DevOps: What It Is and Why It Matters
In the previous blog, I have covered Docker, K8s, Openshift, CI/CD, and in this blog, I’ll be talking about DevOps and why it is needed.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support.
Because of the continuous nature of DevOps, practitioners use the infinity loop to show how the phases of the DevOps lifecycle relate to each other. Despite appearing to flow sequentially, the loop symbolizes the need for constant collaboration and iterative improvement throughout the entire lifecycle.
The origin of DevOps
Before DevOps, software applications were developed with either the waterfall model or the AGILE development model:
- The waterfall or sequential model was a pioneering approach in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). With this model, software development becomes a linear process where different phases and tasks are positioned successively.
- On the other hand, AGILE software development involved the use of various approaches and the collaboration of multiple teams in SDLC.
The linearity of the waterfall model and the cross-functionality of AGILE software development were still unable to ensure quick and continuous delivery of flawless software applications.
DevOps Services came into play by effectively serving the purpose of reducing the time involved in SDLC for prompt deliveries and securing the continuous production of high-quality, foolproof software applications
Lifecycle of DevOps
DevOps is primarily implemented in application development for e-commerce websites, cloud-native applications, and other large distributed platforms. It consists of seven phases that collectively become the DevOps lifecycle.
These seven phases are the main constituents that ensure DevOps optimizes all development processes, right from proposal to production and the complete delivery.
Benefits of DevOps
1. Faster delivery time
The main principles of DevOps — automation, continuous delivery, and quick feedback cycle — aim to make a software development process faster and more efficient. Being an evolutionary stretch of the Agile methodology, DevOps utilizes automation to ensure a smooth flow of the SDLC. By promoting a collaborative culture, it offers the scope for quick and continuous feedback so that any glitches are fixed in time and the releases are done faster.
2. High collaboration between teams
DevOps paves the way to improve business agility by providing the much–need atmosphere of mutual collaboration, communication, and integration across globally–distributed teams in an IT organization. All team members, together, are responsible for meeting the quality and timeliness of deliverables.
3. Greater customer experiences
With DevOps, organizations can improve their deployment frequency by 200x, recovery times by 24x, and lower change failure rates by 3x. By automating the delivery pipeline, it becomes possible to ensure the reliability and stability of an application after every new release.
4. Early defect detection
The collaborative DevOps environment fosters a culture of knowledge sharing across the teams. The automated, continuous monitoring and continuous testing of the code help improve the overall build quality. Teams are empowered to share their feedback so that the defects are detected early as well as resolved early.
Resources:
https://www.cuelogic.com/blog/devops-lifecycle
