DevOps is a set of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that enable organizations to deliver applications and services faster than traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. The increased speed enables businesses to provide superior customer service and compete more effectively in the market.
How does DevOps Works?
The goal of a DevOps team is to increase the speed and quality of software deployment by bringing together developers and IT operations throughout the product lifecycle. It is a new mode of operation, a cultural shift, with profound implications for teams and the organizations for which they work.
Development and operations teams are no longer “siloed” in a DevOps model. Occasionally, these two teams combine to form a single team comprised of engineers who work across the entire application lifecycle – People with both development and operations skill sets collaborate and use CI-CD and monitoring tools to respond quickly to customer requests and resolve issues and bugs.
Benefits of DevOps
Speed
DevOps teams produce deliverables more frequently, with improved quality and consistency. Elite teams deploy 208 times more frequently and 106 times faster than low-performing teams, according to the DORA 2019 State of DevOps study. Teams can use automated technologies to build, test, and deploy software using continuous delivery.
Rapid Delivery
DevOps teams produce more deliverables, with higher quality and consistency. According to the DORA 2019 State of DevOps report, elite teams deploy 208 times more frequently and 106 times faster than low-performing teams. Continuous delivery allows teams to build, test, and release software using automated methods.
Reliability
Ensure the quality of application updates and infrastructure upgrades so you can deliver more frequently while still positive user experience for end-users. Continuous integration and continuous delivery practices can be used to ensure that each change is functional and safe. Monitoring and logging practices enable you to maintain real-time visibility into system performance.
Scale
Scale your infrastructure and development processes by operating and managing them at a large scale. Automation and consistency aid in the efficient and risk-free management of complex or evolving systems. For example, Infrastructure as code, allows you to manage your development, testing, and production environments more consistently and efficiently.
Improved Collaboration
Increase team effectiveness by embracing a DevOps cultural model that places values such as ownership and accountability. Developers and operations teams work in close collaboration, sharing a variety of responsibilities, and integrating their workflows. This results in a reduction of inefficiencies, time savings (e.g. reduced handover times between developers and operations, writing code that takes into account the environment in which it is executed.).
Security
Maintain control and maintain compliance while moving quickly. Using automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques, you can adopt a DevOps model without sacrificing security. For example, you can define and track compliance at scale using infrastructure as code and policy as code.
Why DevOps Matters?
The world and its industries have been transformed by software and the Internet, from shopping to entertainment to banking. Software no longer serves as a supplement to a business; rather, it becomes an integral part of every aspect of the enterprise. Businesses communicate with their customers via software that is delivered as online services or applications and is accessible via a variety of devices. Additionally, they leverage software to boost operational efficiency by transforming all facets of the value chain, including logistics, communications, and operations. Similar to how physical goods companies transformed how they designed, built, and delivered products throughout the 20th century through the use of industrial automation, businesses in today’s world must transform how they build and deliver software.
How to adopt DevOps?
Adopting DevOps takes an initial commitment to assessing and possibly modifying or eliminating any existing teams, tools, or processes in your organization. It entails establishing the required infrastructure to empower teams to produce, deliver, and manage their products independently, without relying excessively on external teams.
DevOps culture
A DevOps culture is one in which teams embrace new methods of cooperation and communication. It is the alignment of people, processes, and tools to achieve a more united customer focus. Multidisciplinary teams are accountable for a product’s whole lifecycle.
Continuous learning
Organizations that perform DevOps well encourage innovation and a certain amount of risk-taking. Where thinking outside the box is encouraged and failure is viewed as a normal part of the process of learning and improvement.
Agile
Agile approaches have exploded in popularity in the software industry because they enable teams to be intrinsically adaptable, well-organized, and adaptable to change. DevOps is a culture shift that promotes teamwork among those responsible for developing and maintaining software. When agile and DevOps are combined, they result in increased efficiency and reliability.
DevOps Practices
- Continuous integration
- Continuous delivery
- Microservices
- Infrastructure as Code
- Monitoring and Logging
- Communication and Collaboration
Continuous Integration
Continuous integration is a software development strategy that automates the process of integrating code changes into a software project. It enables developers to routinely integrate code changes into a centralized repository that hosts build and tests. This enables DevOps teams to address defects more quickly, enhance the quality of their software, and shorten the time required to validate and distribute new software upgrades.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery is an important process that involves delivering software/updates to production in smaller increments, ensuring that the software can be released at any time. With this DevOps approach, the team will always be ready to ‘deliver at any time’ to production.
Microservices
The microservices architecture is a design approach that consists of constructing a single application as a collection of small services. Each service is executed in its process and connects with other services via a well-defined interface, most commonly an HTTP-based application programming interface (API). Microservices are built around business capabilities, with each service serving a single purpose. Microservices can be written in a variety of frameworks or programming languages and deployed independently, as a single service, or as a group of services.
Infrastructure as Code
The process of managing and planning computer data centers using machine-readable definitions is known as infrastructure. This approach is used to promote cloud computing, also known as Infrastructure as a Service (IAS). Infrastructure as a code can be divided into three categories that can be measured.
Monitoring and Logging
Organizations monitor metrics and logs to determine how application and infrastructure performance affects the end-user experience. By capturing, categorizing, and then analyzing data and logs generated by applications and infrastructure, organizations can gain insight into the impact of changes or updates on users, elucidating the root causes of problems or unexpected changes. Active monitoring becomes more critical as services become more dependent on being available 24/7 and as the frequency of application and infrastructure updates increases. Additionally, by establishing alerts and conducting real-time analysis of this data, organizations can monitor their services more proactively.
Communication and Collaboration
Increased communication and collaboration inside a business is an important factor of DevOps culture. By physically connecting development and operations workflows and responsibilities through the use of DevOps technologies and automation of the software delivery process, collaboration is established. These teams establish strong cultural norms around sharing of information and communication facilitation via the usage of chat applications, issue or project tracking systems, and wikis. This facilitates communication between developers, operations, and even other departments such as marketing or sales, allowing all facets of the organization to work more closely together on goals and projects.
Get started with DevOps
Identifying a small value stream (small supporting app or service) and experimenting with DevOps methods is the simplest approach to get started with DevOps. It is significantly easier to alter a single stream with a small set of stakeholders than to undertake an all-at-once organizational transition to a new style of working, just as it is with software development.
DevOps is meant to be a set of practices that automates and integrates the software development and IT teams. Skynats, which is having a panel of experts is all set to render you with DevOps support services to deliver end-to-end DevOps operations.
