The Rundown on DevOps
DevOps at its core are two enterprise teams connected: Development and Operations. The origin of “DevOps” comes from a conference in Toronto talking about the disconnect between development and infrastructure methods, and discovering that these 2 operations (Development and Operations) are actually connected through the idea that both are important for deployment.
DevOps Lifecycle explained
The DevOps lifecycle is part of the concept of SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle), which is how a service or product is developed through stages however such life cycles as Waterfall aren’t as effective for bigger projects, and teams of different stages never interact with each other which could lead to a chaotic experience for the project.
This comes with the DevOps lifecycle to fix the issues of other SDLCs because it allows teams to be involved in stages of DevOps and not just offload the work to a different team to handle the next stage.
DevOps Lifecycle in stages
The planning stage is for gathering what technologies, resources, and infrastructure will be used for in the project.
The coding stage is where the team of developers works on creating the product that was guidelines from the planning stage.
The build stage is where the developers put their code into a repo for everyone in the team can view and use tools for automating the testing to check for bugs in the code.
The test stage is for testing the build for vulnerabilities in security and performance before allowing a release.
The release stage is when the build can finally be deployed to the production environment.
The deploy stage is where end-users can access the product such as a live website or downloadable program.
Operate stage is finding parts of the product that can gain improvements through new features or removing features that are not needed.
The monitor stage is for feedback that was assessed to be used for the next planning stage of a new DevOps lifecycle.
What makes using DevOps beneficial?
From the AWS (Amazon Web Services) webpage on “What is DevOps?”, the benefits of DevOps can be simplified to “rapid delivery”, “improved collaboration”, “scale”, “reliability” and “security”. These advantages for DevOps are important because its well responsive to feedback by end-users to deliver a better product continuously, and allows front/back end developers to interact with network and systems engineers as well as share the workload necessary for the product they are delivering. Additionally, for scalability it allows the product to perform efficiently to the needs of the end-users and decreases the chances of failure. For security & reliability, the pros are following compliance and ensuring the product is working live even when going through updates by the DevOps team.
DevOps in the real-world
An example of a company utilizing DevOps for issues they were having is Sony and specifically on the subject of its digital entertainment. The issue they had was giving users software delivery. They resolved the problem by hiring a DevOps consultancy called Stelligent to address the problems with continuous delivery, which is vital to the DevOps lifecycle of continuous integration and delivery. Stelligent decided to take advantage of the AWS infrastructure to fix customers’ feedback on Sony’s services.
