Many DevOps methods streamline software development and deployment during an early stage in agile software development and lean programming. But DevOps originally evolved from several basic movements, harmonizing the activities of developers and their colleagues on the operations team.
In the early 2000s, the need arose to maintain the availability of popular websites such as Google and Flickr against significant hits, leading to the use of Software Reliability Engineers (SREs). SREs are operations staff who work closely with developers to ensure the sites continue to run after the code is put into production.
In the years that followed, the industry developed and proposed open-source tools and frameworks to further the goals of DevOps.
This post gives you insights into the basics of DevOps: what DevOps is, popular DevOps methods, the tools used by DevOps, and the most popular DevOps practices.
DevOps: what is it?
DevOps is an evolving philosophy and framework which encourages faster, better application development striving for a quicker release of newly developed or revised features of software or products that you ship to a customer.
The DevOps philosophy strives to reach smooth, continuous communication, collaboration, integration, visibility, and transparency between an application development team (Dev) and their IT operations team (OPS) colleagues, meaning that an agile approach is critical for DevOps.
The very close relationship between Dev and Ops is visible in every phase of a DevOps lifecycle, from initial software planning to the code, build, test, and release phases to deployment, operations, and continuous monitoring/improvement. This relationship ensures constant feedback to (internal) customers for further improvement, development, testing, and implementation. One of the consequences of these efforts may be that required feature changes or additions are released faster and continuously conform to the CI/CD pipeline (continuous integration and continuous deployment) approach.
You can categorize DevOps goals into four groups: DevOps culture, DevOps automation, DevOps measurement, and DevOps sharing (CAMS). DevOps tools can help reach specific DevOps goals in these groups. These tools can better streamline development and operations workflows and make them suitable for collaboration. You can automate previously time-consuming, manual, or static tasks involved in integration, development, testing, deployment, or monitoring.
The importance of DevOps
Besides efforts to remove blockades to communication and collaboration between development and ICT operations teams, a core value of DevOps is (internal) customer satisfaction and faster delivery of value. The DevOps method is also designed to drive business innovation and improve processes continuously.
DevOps encourages faster, better, and more secure value delivery to an organization’s end customers. This value may take the form of more frequent product releases, features, or updates. It may be the speed at which a product release or new feature reaches the internal customer, all with appropriate levels of quality and security. Or the focus might be on how quickly a problem or bug is identified and then fixed and re-released. The underlying infrastructure also supports DevOps with seamless performance, availability, and reliability of software when you first develop and test it and then put it into production.
DevOps Methods
There are a few standard DevOps methods that organizations can use to accelerate and improve development and product releases. They take the form of software development methods and practices. The most popular techniques:
Scrum
Scrum defines how team members should work together to accelerate development and Quality Assurance (QA) projects. Typical scrum practices include key workflows and specific terminology (sprints, periods, daily scrum meetings, and designated roles (Scrum Master, product owner).
Kanban
Kanban evolved from efficiencies achieved on the factory floor at Toyota. Kanban dictates that you track the status of software project work in progress (WIP) on a Kanban board.
Agile Previous Agile software development methods continue to influence DevOps practices and tools strongly. Many DevOps methodologies, including Scrum and Kanban, incorporate elements of Agile programming. Some flexible practices are associated with excellent follow-up to the ever-changing needs and requirements of (internal) customers, documenting requirements as user stories, conducting daily standups, and incorporating continuous feedback from your (internal) customers. The agile approach strives for shorter software development lifecycles instead of long, traditional waterfall development methods.
DevOps ToolChain
You can use specific DevOps-friendly tools as part of a DevOps toolchain. The purpose of these tools is to streamline further, shorten and automate the various phases of the software delivery workflow (or pipeline). Many of these tools promote the core DevOps principles of automation, collaboration, and integration between development and operations teams. Some popular tools:
Planning
The planning phase helps define business value and requirements. Examples of tools include Jira or Git to track known issues and perform project management.
Code
Coding involves designing software and creating software code. Examples of tools include GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Stash.
Building
In the building phase, DevOps manages software builds and versions. DevOps uses automated tools that help a developer compile and package code required for future releases to production. You use source code or package repositories that also ‘package’ the infrastructure needed for product release. Examples of tools include Docker, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Gradle, Maven, or JFrog Artifactory.
Testing
During testing, you are continuously testing (manual or automated) to ensure optimal code quality. Examples of tools include JUnit, Codeception, Selenium, Vagrant, TestNG, and BlazeMeter.
Implementation
During this phase, you can use tools that help you manage, coordinate, plan, and automate product releases to production. Examples of tools include Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Jenkins, Kubernetes, OpenShift, OpenStack, Docker, or Jira.
Maintaining
During the maintenance phase, you manage software during production. Examples of tools include Ansible, Puppet, PowerShell, Chef, Salt, or Otter.
Monitoring
Monitoring supports you in managing software during production. Examples of tools include Ansible, Puppet, PowerShell, Chef, Salt, or Otter.
Practices of DevOps
DevOps practices reflect the idea of automation and continuous improvement. Many DevOps practices focus on one or more development cycle phases:
Continuous Development
The Continuous Development practice covers the planning and coding phases of the DevOps lifecycle. Versioning mechanisms may be involved.
Continuous Testing
This practice includes automated, pre-planned, continuous code testing while application code is being written or updated. Such tests can speed up the delivery of code to production.
Continuous Integration (CI)
Already briefly mentioned. CI brings CM (Configuration Management) tools together with other testing and development tools. CM determines how much code the development team has developed is ready for production, including receiving rapid feedback between the testing and development phases to identify and resolve code issues quickly.
Continuous Delivery
Not the same as Continuous Deployment (CD), named after this section. The Continuous Delivery practice automates the delivery of code changes after testing in a pre-production or staging environment, but the release is approved manually. Without this approval, there is no release, meaning a collaborator decides to promote such code changes to production.
Continuous Deployment (CD)
Continuous Deployment (CD), like Continuous Delivery, automates the release of new or modified code to production without manual approval: the deployment is fully automatic, which is also the key difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment. A company that deploys continuously may release code or feature changes several times a day, using a container of technologies, such as Docker and Kubernetes, enabling continuous deployment by helping maintain code consistency across different deployment platforms and environments.
Continuous Monitoring
This practice involves continuous monitoring of both the operational code and the underlying infrastructure that supports it. A feedback loop reporting on bugs or issues then goes back to the development team, who can take action if this is required.
Infrastructure as a Code
You use the Infrastructure as a Code practice during various DevOps phases that focus on automating the provisioning of the infrastructure required to release the software. A Developer adds infrastructure code from within their existing development tools. For example, developers can create a storage volume on demand based on Kubernetes or OpenShift. This practice also enables your operations teams to monitor environment configurations, track changes, and simplify the rollback of configurations.
Final Thoughts
The power of DevOps lies in its ability to enhance collaboration and communication between development and operations teams, automate processes, and increase efficiency and speed in delivering high-quality software products. DevOps helps organizations reduce time to market, improve application reliability, and increase customer satisfaction. Additionally, DevOps practices promote a culture of continuous improvement, enabling organizations to respond quickly to changing business requirements and market conditions. DevOps also supports optimizing customer/user satisfaction by delivering software and applications that meet users’ and customers’ ever-changing needs and requirements.
I think that DevOps is a must in the modern and very agile world of software and application development we are now living in. Not being ahead of the game will give you a disadvantage over your competitors. DevOps contributes to faster, better delivery of software and applications, faster problem-solving, and reduced complexity. You will also be able to improve the scalability and availability of your software while creating a more stable operating environment with better utilization of your resources. DevOps leads to more automation, greater insight into your system results, and more innovation. Feel free to contact me if you have questions or in case you have any additional advice/tips about this subject. If you want to keep me in the loop if I upload a new post, make sure to subscribe so you receive a notification by e-mail.
