Definition: What Is DevOps?
DevOps is a set of practices that combine software development (Dev) and information technology operations (Ops) to reduce the time between committing a code change and deploying the change to production.
However, DevOps is not a tool or a technology. Although it relies on automation tools to streamline the process of software development and delivery, DevOps is not defined by the tools a company uses, but by its practices.
DevOps practices advocate close collaboration between operations personnel and developers throughout the software development lifecycle to help organizations get their products and services to market faster.
Benefits: Why Is DevOps Important?
DevOps can help organizations increase agility, improve communication and collaboration, and reduce time to market.
Increased agility
One of the key DevOps practices is the automation of the software development and delivery process. By automating repetitive tasks such as code testing, deployments, and infrastructure provisioning that are traditionally done manually, DevOps provides the ability to respond to change quickly and efficiently.
Improved communication and collaboration
DevOps is based on communication and collaboration between development and operations teams. By working closely together, these two teams can better understand each other's needs and priorities, resulting in faster problem resolution and greater efficiency.
Faster time to market
DevOps can reduce the time it takes for code changes, whether bug fixes or new features, to be available in production once the code has been pushed to the central repository. By automating tasks such as testing and deploying code and prioritizing the secure solution, this pattern can make the development and operations team more agile, solutions readily available, and businesses more competitive.
Better feedback loop
A feedback loop refers to collecting information from different units and teams in an organization and sending the information directly to the correct departments or teams. The respective teams can use this information to improve the speed of delivery and the quality of the solution.
The DevOps model simplifies the feedback loop by automating the feedback process and encompassing right-to-left feedback. The output obtained during the last stage of development is automatically sent as input to the previous stage. For example, if an error occurs during the build phase, the testing team will automatically receive an error message prompting them to take action. As a result, the DevOps feedback loop increases deployment speed and improves product quality.
Increased security
For greater efficiency and better results, DevOps is often extended to solution security. The practice, called DevSecOps, focuses on building security measures into products and features at every stage of the development process, rather than at the end. This allows teams to quickly identify and resolve security issues instead of having to wait for the final release. DevSecOps accelerates the delivery of solutions and reduces the cost of producing software.
How Does DevOps Work?
DevOps brings development and operations teams together and breaks down the traditional silo between these two teams.
Traditionally, these two teams operated in their own worlds. To keep up, they spend a lot of time and effort in meetings, conferences and email exchanges.
By adopting DevOps, organizations can move from service goals to business goals and embrace a collaborative and proactive work environment. With the help of automated tools and accelerated processes, teams in these companies work more closely together and can identify and resolve issues much faster.
In short, the DevOps practice prioritizes security and automates and monitors the entire software delivery process from development to production.
The DevOps Lifecycle
The DevOps lifecycle consists of four main phases which can be represented as an endless loop. These phases work together to form a feedback loop that enables an organization to quickly deliver a quality-assured solution to its customers.
Design and planning
The first phase of the DevOps lifecycle is planning. At this point, all stakeholders from the business, development, and IT teams come together to finalize the list of features that will be part of the next development cycle and to assess the value these features will bring to the business.
Continuous Integration
Next is continuous integration, a DevOps methodology that consists of three stages: code, build, and test. These steps are used to improve product quality and leverage automation to build it.
Under this model, code changes are regularly merged into the central repository. The code base is then determined with an automated tool and the code quality is tested. Once the code is tested, a binary solution is built and functionally tested.
Teams can use manual and automated test metrics to create comprehensive reports that can be used across the organization.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous deployment is another cycle of the DevOps model that combines two phases: release and deployment. This implies that all QC builds are automatically released and deployed to pre-production or production environments. The DevOps team can set the release and deployment frequency based on your needs.
Continuous Monitoring
Continuous monitoring is the final part of the DevOps lifecycle, which consists of two phases: operations and monitoring. Essentially, it focuses on overseeing the operation of the software, gathering necessary information about its security and status, and working with team members to resolve issues quickly and efficiently.
How to Adopt a DevOps Model?
Adopting the DevOps model is easier said than done; it requires fundamental culture and process changes. Here are some steps you could take:
Promote collaboration
The DevOps approach relies on collaboration between Dev and Ops teams. To get the best result, you need to give people in your organization more visibility into the infinite loop. This way, not only the development team, but also the organization will understand your product architecture, allowing teams to deploy new features faster and resolve incidents efficiently.
Trust Automation
Automation is necessary to speed up the development process, so whenever you can automate, you should. DevOps uses automation to streamline the software development and delivery process.
With that in mind, you need to think about your automation implementation. Use industry standards and best practices wherever possible. Take the time to set up a process that everyone can understand and adapt quickly. Always start automation with repetitive and error-prone processes.
Aim for quality based on statistics
Organizations that have adopted DevOps practices have adopted them to ensure the quality of their products. More often than not, however, the point of failure for companies striving for a quality product is poor metrics. To avoid these pitfalls, leverage DevOps metrics that show progress and provide early business value.
Metrics such as production failure rate, deployment speed, deployment frequency, and mean time to recovery of a failed application in a production environment could be key metrics you want to implement in your model DevOps.
Additionally, you can also implement the right metrics monitoring tool to strengthen your feedback loop, reduce errors, and improve your overall product quality.
Continuously improve
When getting started with DevOps, don't try to deploy it to your entire organization all at once. Instead, identify the area that would produce the greatest value. Then create a pilot program with a cross-functional team that includes developers, testers, and operations, and gradually improve the solution.
Successfully adopting the DevOps approach requires continually improving the process and the tools. Let your teams search for better methods and do not hesitate to listen to them.
DevOps Model Challenges
While adopting the DevOps model improves the efficiency of the development and release process, it also comes with some challenges.
Culture Change
DevOps requires a cultural shift. For development and operations teams to work together, both teams must understand shared responsibilities and work together to resolve issues.
If teams cannot solve this challenge at an early stage, the efficiency of the entire development unit and therefore the organization suffers. One way to overcome this challenge is to create a shared vision, established through team communication.
Receiving tools
The DevOps model involves the use of new tools, which means replacing the legacy system with newer tools while implementing new tools and processes. Although it may seem daunting, team members need to be trained in the use of modern tools to meet this challenge.
However, tools should not be the sole focus of the transition to DevOps culture. Exciting new tools are released every two days. But you should focus on acquiring the tools that best fit your business case.
Setting up processes and metrics
Working with the DevOps model means changing processes. This can mean anything from enabling a CI/CD pipeline to creating a test automation strategy. After the processes, you also need to define and monitor relevant DevOps metrics. However, selecting and implementing metrics requires looking at your processes and defining metrics that are closely tied to your business goals.
Doing all of these at once can be a daunting task. One approach to meeting this challenge is to start small. Creating a small pilot program with a test framework effectively addresses this challenge.
Change management
DevOps requires a culture of continuous improvement and learning. Organizations need to understand that a process and set of tools may not be relevant as it evolves in the DevOps model or the product matures. The organization, with its DevOps team, must be able to adapt to current needs.
Adaptation is only possible through accountability, continuous improvement and continuous learning.
DevOps Practices
DevOps practices promote continuous improvement and continuous integration. These practices cover one or more phases of development.
Ongoing design and development
Continuous build and development is a DevOps concept that supports integrating code changes into a shared code repository and creating solutions frequently. This practice recommends that any changes made on the local machine be pushed to the central business unit repository, and then a build process be triggered frequently.
This practice reduces the need to wait until the end of the release cycle for code changes to be available to users. Since the application is continuously built even after minor code updates, the security of the solution and the quality of the code can also improve since it is easier to test the quality of a minor change what a major change. And if a vulnerability is identified after the patch is created, a patch can be applied and the patch recreated quickly, preventing insiders from exploiting the vulnerability.
Additionally, the user experience is less likely to be disrupted as small changes are made to the repository and applications are created frequently.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery is a DevOps practice that automatically deploys code changes to production. This way, quality-checked and security-monitored code is automatically available in the pre-production or staging environment. This practice is essential to reduce time to market.
Automation
This DevOps practice eliminates manual and repetitive processes that could be prone to error. According to this practice, when you push a code change to the central repository, the processes of building, testing, and deploying applications should occur automatically and simultaneously. Like continuous delivery, this process reduces the time required to manually activate related processes.
Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as code is the idea of deploying, versioning, and managing infrastructure like any other code. For example, developers can use code to automatically create a Docker container to manage workloads.
Infrastructure as code reduces the risk of errors associated with manual manipulation, provides a stable, consistent, and easily modifiable environment, and optimizes costs by automatically increasing resources when needed and decreasing them when resources are needed. are not used.
Move Safety Left
Shift Left Security is the DevOps concept of implementing security early in the development cycle rather than waiting until the end and wrapping the application around a layer of security.
As your DevOps team moves to the left side of the development cycle, security best practices and solutions to potential security issues should be implemented in each of the following stages.
Agile methods
Agile methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban are DevOps practices that facilitate planning and collaboration. They also provide a standard way to collect customer feedback and allow teams to act on that feedback faster with a shorter release cycle. Agile methods focus on people and the rapidly changing environment, improving the speed and quality of the software development process.
Logging and Monitoring
Development and operations teams use logging and monitoring to track and troubleshoot performance throughout the development cycle, from planning to development, integration and testing, deployment, and operations. With logging and monitoring tools, you can strengthen your feedback loop and reduce the risk of errors.
Communication and cooperation
Communication and collaboration are key DevOps practices that help development and operations teams work together effectively. It emphasizes transparency and problem solving through clear communication throughout the organization. Here are some of the ways to improve collaboration and communication:
- understanding roles of each team member,
- building transparent roadmap that serve as a single source of truth
- extensively using project management tools like scrum boards
- opting for face-to-face or verbal meetings
It is possible that not all the tools you find on the market will meet your needs. Building the right DevOps toolchain for your business needs is critical to adopting DevOps practices. Here are some types of DevOps tools you might need:
- Cloud Solutions
- Database tools
- Version control tools
- Infrastructure as a Code Providers
- Configuration management tools
- Containerization Platform
- Container Orchestration Tools
- Monitoring tools
- Log Management and Monitoring Solutions
- Continuous integration tools
- Build tools
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Maryam Loni
Definition: What Is DevOps?
DevOps is a set of practices that combine software development (Dev) and information technology operations (Ops) to reduce the time between committing a code change and deploying the change to production.
However, DevOps is not a tool or a technology. Although it relies on automation tools to streamline the process of software development and delivery, DevOps is not defined by the tools a company uses, but by its practices.
DevOps practices advocate close collaboration between operations personnel and developers throughout the software development lifecycle to help organizations get their products and services to market faster.
Benefits: Why Is DevOps Important?
DevOps can help organizations increase agility, improve communication and collaboration, and reduce time to market.
Increased agility
One of the key DevOps practices is the automation of the software development and delivery process. By automating repetitive tasks such as code testing, deployments, and infrastructure provisioning that are traditionally done manually, DevOps provides the ability to respond to change quickly and efficiently.
Improved communication and collaboration
DevOps is based on communication and collaboration between development and operations teams. By working closely together, these two teams can better understand each other's needs and priorities, resulting in faster problem resolution and greater efficiency.
Faster time to market
DevOps can reduce the time it takes for code changes, whether bug fixes or new features, to be available in production once the code has been pushed to the central repository. By automating tasks such as testing and deploying code and prioritizing the secure solution, this pattern can make the development and operations team more agile, solutions readily available, and businesses more competitive.
Better feedback loop
A feedback loop refers to collecting information from different units and teams in an organization and sending the information directly to the correct departments or teams. The respective teams can use this information to improve the speed of delivery and the quality of the solution.
The DevOps model simplifies the feedback loop by automating the feedback process and encompassing right-to-left feedback. The output obtained during the last stage of development is automatically sent as input to the previous stage. For example, if an error occurs during the build phase, the testing team will automatically receive an error message prompting them to take action. As a result, the DevOps feedback loop increases deployment speed and improves product quality.
Increased security
For greater efficiency and better results, DevOps is often extended to solution security. The practice, called DevSecOps, focuses on building security measures into products and features at every stage of the development process, rather than at the end. This allows teams to quickly identify and resolve security issues instead of having to wait for the final release. DevSecOps accelerates the delivery of solutions and reduces the cost of producing software.
How Does DevOps Work?
DevOps brings development and operations teams together and breaks down the traditional silo between these two teams.
Traditionally, these two teams operated in their own worlds. To keep up, they spend a lot of time and effort in meetings, conferences and email exchanges.
By adopting DevOps, organizations can move from service goals to business goals and embrace a collaborative and proactive work environment. With the help of automated tools and accelerated processes, teams in these companies work more closely together and can identify and resolve issues much faster.
In short, the DevOps practice prioritizes security and automates and monitors the entire software delivery process from development to production.
The DevOps Lifecycle
The DevOps lifecycle consists of four main phases which can be represented as an endless loop. These phases work together to form a feedback loop that enables an organization to quickly deliver a quality-assured solution to its customers.
Design and planning
The first phase of the DevOps lifecycle is planning. At this point, all stakeholders from the business, development, and IT teams come together to finalize the list of features that will be part of the next development cycle and to assess the value these features will bring to the business.
Continuous Integration
Next is continuous integration, a DevOps methodology that consists of three stages: code, build, and test. These steps are used to improve product quality and leverage automation to build it.
Under this model, code changes are regularly merged into the central repository. The code base is then determined with an automated tool and the code quality is tested. Once the code is tested, a binary solution is built and functionally tested.
Teams can use manual and automated test metrics to create comprehensive reports that can be used across the organization.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous deployment is another cycle of the DevOps model that combines two phases: release and deployment. This implies that all QC builds are automatically released and deployed to pre-production or production environments. The DevOps team can set the release and deployment frequency based on your needs.
Continuous Monitoring
Continuous monitoring is the final part of the DevOps lifecycle, which consists of two phases: operations and monitoring. Essentially, it focuses on overseeing the operation of the software, gathering necessary information about its security and status, and working with team members to resolve issues quickly and efficiently.
How to Adopt a DevOps Model?
Adopting the DevOps model is easier said than done; it requires fundamental culture and process changes. Here are some steps you could take:
Promote collaboration
The DevOps approach relies on collaboration between Dev and Ops teams. To get the best result, you need to give people in your organization more visibility into the infinite loop. This way, not only the development team, but also the organization will understand your product architecture, allowing teams to deploy new features faster and resolve incidents efficiently.
Trust Automation
Automation is necessary to speed up the development process, so whenever you can automate, you should. DevOps uses automation to streamline the software development and delivery process.
With that in mind, you need to think about your automation implementation. Use industry standards and best practices wherever possible. Take the time to set up a process that everyone can understand and adapt quickly. Always start automation with repetitive and error-prone processes.
Aim for quality based on statistics
Organizations that have adopted DevOps practices have adopted them to ensure the quality of their products. More often than not, however, the point of failure for companies striving for a quality product is poor metrics. To avoid these pitfalls, leverage DevOps metrics that show progress and provide early business value.
Metrics such as production failure rate, deployment speed, deployment frequency, and mean time to recovery of a failed application in a production environment could be key metrics you want to implement in your model DevOps.
Additionally, you can also implement the right metrics monitoring tool to strengthen your feedback loop, reduce errors, and improve your overall product quality.
Continuously improve
When getting started with DevOps, don't try to deploy it to your entire organization all at once. Instead, identify the area that would produce the greatest value. Then create a pilot program with a cross-functional team that includes developers, testers, and operations, and gradually improve the solution.
Successfully adopting the DevOps approach requires continually improving the process and the tools. Let your teams search for better methods and do not hesitate to listen to them.
DevOps Model Challenges
While adopting the DevOps model improves the efficiency of the development and release process, it also comes with some challenges.
Culture Change
DevOps requires a cultural shift. For development and operations teams to work together, both teams must understand shared responsibilities and work together to resolve issues.
If teams cannot solve this challenge at an early stage, the efficiency of the entire development unit and therefore the organization suffers. One way to overcome this challenge is to create a shared vision, established through team communication.
Receiving tools
The DevOps model involves the use of new tools, which means replacing the legacy system with newer tools while implementing new tools and processes. Although it may seem daunting, team members need to be trained in the use of modern tools to meet this challenge.
However, tools should not be the sole focus of the transition to DevOps culture. Exciting new tools are released every two days. But you should focus on acquiring the tools that best fit your business case.
Setting up processes and metrics
Working with the DevOps model means changing processes. This can mean anything from enabling a CI/CD pipeline to creating a test automation strategy. After the processes, you also need to define and monitor relevant DevOps metrics. However, selecting and implementing metrics requires looking at your processes and defining metrics that are closely tied to your business goals.
Doing all of these at once can be a daunting task. One approach to meeting this challenge is to start small. Creating a small pilot program with a test framework effectively addresses this challenge.
Change management
DevOps requires a culture of continuous improvement and learning. Organizations need to understand that a process and set of tools may not be relevant as it evolves in the DevOps model or the product matures. The organization, with its DevOps team, must be able to adapt to current needs.
Adaptation is only possible through accountability, continuous improvement and continuous learning.
DevOps Practices
DevOps practices promote continuous improvement and continuous integration. These practices cover one or more phases of development.
Ongoing design and development
Continuous build and development is a DevOps concept that supports integrating code changes into a shared code repository and creating solutions frequently. This practice recommends that any changes made on the local machine be pushed to the central business unit repository, and then a build process be triggered frequently.
This practice reduces the need to wait until the end of the release cycle for code changes to be available to users. Since the application is continuously built even after minor code updates, the security of the solution and the quality of the code can also improve since it is easier to test the quality of a minor change what a major change. And if a vulnerability is identified after the patch is created, a patch can be applied and the patch recreated quickly, preventing insiders from exploiting the vulnerability.
Additionally, the user experience is less likely to be disrupted as small changes are made to the repository and applications are created frequently.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery is a DevOps practice that automatically deploys code changes to production. This way, quality-checked and security-monitored code is automatically available in the pre-production or staging environment. This practice is essential to reduce time to market.
Automation
This DevOps practice eliminates manual and repetitive processes that could be prone to error. According to this practice, when you push a code change to the central repository, the processes of building, testing, and deploying applications should occur automatically and simultaneously. Like continuous delivery, this process reduces the time required to manually activate related processes.
Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as code is the idea of deploying, versioning, and managing infrastructure like any other code. For example, developers can use code to automatically create a Docker container to manage workloads.
Infrastructure as code reduces the risk of errors associated with manual manipulation, provides a stable, consistent, and easily modifiable environment, and optimizes costs by automatically increasing resources when needed and decreasing them when resources are needed. are not used.
Move Safety Left
Shift Left Security is the DevOps concept of implementing security early in the development cycle rather than waiting until the end and wrapping the application around a layer of security.
As your DevOps team moves to the left side of the development cycle, security best practices and solutions to potential security issues should be implemented in each of the following stages.
Agile methods
Agile methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban are DevOps practices that facilitate planning and collaboration. They also provide a standard way to collect customer feedback and allow teams to act on that feedback faster with a shorter release cycle. Agile methods focus on people and the rapidly changing environment, improving the speed and quality of the software development process.
Logging and Monitoring
Development and operations teams use logging and monitoring to track and troubleshoot performance throughout the development cycle, from planning to development, integration and testing, deployment, and operations. With logging and monitoring tools, you can strengthen your feedback loop and reduce the risk of errors.
Communication and cooperation
Communication and collaboration are key DevOps practices that help development and operations teams work together effectively. It emphasizes transparency and problem solving through clear communication throughout the organization. Here are some of the ways to improve collaboration and communication:
DevOps Tools and Platforms
It is possible that not all the tools you find on the market will meet your needs. Building the right DevOps toolchain for your business needs is critical to adopting DevOps practices. Here are some types of DevOps tools you might need:
Read Also : What ChatGPT results that will blow your mind?