DevOps is not a tool, it’s an approach and it’s a culture with an objective to optimize SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) by bringing development and operations together. It’s an entirely new ideology that has swept IT organizations worldwide, boosting project life cycles and in turn increasing profits. DevOps promotes collaboration between development engineers and operations, participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support.
The word “DevOps” is an amalgamation of the words “development” and “operations.” DevOps helps increase the speed of delivering applications and services. It allows organizations to serve their customers efficiently and become more competitive in the market. In simple terms, DevOps is an alignment between development and IT operations with better communication and collaboration.
DevOps assumes a culture where collaboration among the development, operations, and business teams is considered a critical aspect of the journey. It’s not solely about the tools, as DevOps in an organization creates continuous value for customers. Tools are one of its pillars, alongside people and processes. DevOps increases organizations’ capability to deliver high-quality solutions at a swift pace. It automates all processes, from build to deployment, of an application or a product.
What exactly is DevOps?
Imagine a real situation, it’s the sales’ first day and you’re on the favorite brand’s website. You spot the t-shirt you’ve been desiring for several months. You put it in your basket and there, it is a tragedy… the site no longer responds. A few hours later, you return to the site but the t-shirt is no longer available in your size. If the developer team and the operational team had communicated better, this problem would probably not have occurred.
Where did DevOps come from? It is the contraction of Developer (Dev) and Operational (Ops). This term appeared in 2008 at the Shafter conference and spread widely in 2013 thanks to the book “The Phoenix Project”. Historically, developer teams and operational teams have antagonistic objectives, we name that the “wall of confusion”. Developers must produce new functionalities, and the Ops ensure the reliability of the software or application.
The DevOps methodology, therefore, consists in having developers and Ops communicate and collaborate on your projects to:
- save time on problem-solving,
- launch new features faster
- while reducing risks through process automation,
- and thus, increase your customers’ satisfaction.
To see those results in your business, you have to follow the DevOps process.
Challenges for the development team
Developers are typically enthusiastic and willing to adopt new approaches and technologies to solve organizations’ problems. However, they do face challenges, such as:
- The competitive marketplace creates a lot of pressure for on-time delivery.
- They must cater to production-ready code management and new capability implementation.
- The release cycle is long, so the development team has to make several assumptions before application deployment. In such a scenario, it takes more time to resolve issues that occur during deployment in the production or staging environment.
Challenges for the operations team
Operators are historically focused on the stability and reliability of IT services. The operations team is, therefore, concerned about making changes to resources, technologies, or approaches as they look for stability. Their challenges include:
- Managing resource contention as demands for resources increase
- Handling redesigns or tweaks required for application execution in a production environment
- Diagnosing and resolving production-related issues after application deployment in isolation
Understanding the DevOps Process
To apply those DevOps principles you have to follow 8 steps for each new deployment:
- Plan/Analyze: Schedule tasks and deadlines for the new software development project.
- Code/Edit: Code development and code review. Collaboration with Ops about the new features.
- Build: build the source code into a format and deploying in a particular place of the infrastructure. It is the first step toward continuous integration (CI).
- Test: continuous testing and improvement.
- Debug & Release: The code is ready to be deployed according to continuous integration tools.
- Deploy: Automation process with continuous deployment (CD).
- Operate: build or maintain a scalable infrastructure, infrastructure as code, security issues, log management, Feedback, tune, diagnose,Audit.
- Monitor: monitoring tools are there to identify incidents faster and so fix them quickly.
Continuous integration is part of the DevOps process and is a way to reduce risk and launch new features faster. This is a good way to make Developers and Ops complementary, thus breaking the silos between them.
DevOps lifecycle
DevOps includes the adoption of certain common practices.
Continuous planning
Continuous planning leverages lean principles in order to start smaller by identifying the resources and outcomes needed to test the business value or vision, adapt continually, measure progress, learn from the customers’ needs, shift direction as needed with agility, and update the business plan.
Collaborative development
The collaborative development process enables collaboration between business, development, and test teams that are spread across different time zones to deliver quality software continuously. This includes multiplatform development, support for polyglot programming, creation of user stories, elaboration of ideas, and lifecycle management. Collaborative development includes the process and practice of continuous integration, which promotes frequent code integrations and automatic builds. By integrating application code frequently, integration issues are identified earlier in the lifecycle (when they are easier to fix), and the overall integration effort is reduced via continuous feedback because the project shows continuous and demonstrable progress.
Continuous testing
Continuous testing reduces the testing cost while helping the development teams balance speed and quality. It also eliminates testing bottlenecks through virtualized services and simplifies the creation of virtualized test environments that can be easily shared, deployed, and updated as systems change. These capabilities reduce the cost of provisioning and maintaining test environments and shorten test-cycle times by allowing integration testing early in the lifecycle.
Continuous release and deployment
This adoption path entails one major practice: continuous release and deployment. Continuous release and deployment provide a continuous delivery pipeline that automates key processes. It reduces the number of manual processes, wait times for resources, and amount of rework by enabling push-button deployment that ensures higher numbers of releases, reduced errors, and end-to-end transparency.
Automation plays a key role in ensuring the software is released repeatably and reliably. One critical objective is to take manual processes like build, regression, deployment, and infrastructure provisioning and automate them. This requires version control for source code; test and deployment scripts; infrastructure and application configuration data; and the libraries and packages the application depends on. The ability to query the state of all environments is another important factor.
Continuous monitoring
Continuous monitoring ensures enterprise-grade reporting capabilities that help development teams understand the availability and performance of applications in the production landscape, even before they are deployed to production. The early feedback provided by continuous monitoring is critical for lowering the cost of errors and for steering projects in the right direction. This practice often includes observability tools, which tend to expose metrics related to application performance.
Continuous feedback and optimization
Continuous feedback and optimization provide visual evidence for analyzing customer journeys and pinpointing pain areas. Feedback can be enabled for both pre-and post-production phases to maximize value and ensure that even more transactions are successfully completed. This provides immediate visibility into the root cause of customer struggles that affect behavior and impact business.
Benefits of DevOps
DevOps can facilitate a collaborative environment where developers and operators work as a team toward common ends. A major milestone in this process is the implementation of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). This enables teams to launch the software to the market faster with fewer errors.
Important benefits of DevOps are:
- Predictability: DevOps offers a significantly lower failure rate for new releases.
- Maintainability: It enables effortless recovery in the event of a new release crashing or disabling the application.
- Reproducibility: Versioning the builds or the code enables earlier versions to be restored as needed.
- Higher quality: Incorporating infrastructure issues improves application development quality.
- Time to market: Streamlined software delivery reduces time to market by 50%.
- Reduced risk: Incorporating security into the software lifecycle reduces defects across its lifecycle.
- Cost-efficiency: Driving cost-efficiency in software development pleases senior management.
- Resiliency: The software system is more stable, secure, and changes are auditable.
- Breaks larger codebase into manageable pieces: DevOps is based on the agile programming method, which supports breaking down larger codebases into smaller, more manageable chunks.
How to apply the DevOps methodology
DevOps: how to adapt it to an agile methodology
The Agile methodology is growing in companies. But is the agile methodology compatible with the DevOps culture?
The main goal of the agile methodology is to shorten the duration of development cycles and therefore, the frequency between different product releases.
As a reminder, the DevOps culture consists of smoothing the relationships between developer teams and Ops to make faster and better quality production releases.
At this stage, the two methodologies seem to meet since they have a common goal. However, there is a difference. The agile methodology is by definition agile, flexible. It allows the priorities of developments to be adapted to unexpected circumstances or changes in direction. However, in the DevOps methodology, unforeseen events are not easy to bring into the traditional scheme of prioritizing tasks.
So how to adapt the Agile methodology to DevOps? The answer is simple: you have to take into account the issues related to the development and Ops businesses. This involves three actions:
- Formulate requests in the form of tickets. Thus, workloads are well established. Don’t forget to create a ticket to give time to the unexpected, at Padok we call it the buffer.
- Participate in each other’s events. Yes, communication is the key! To set up a continuous improvement process, it is necessary to plan discussions where everyone gives their blocking points to progress on the project.
- Raise awareness among developers and Ops teams. Each team must know the impact of its team’s work on the business and end-users. If we take the example of the t-shirt in sales, an e-commerce site can lose up to 30,000 euros on a morning of sales if the site no longer responds. By having this information, the Developers will better value the work of the operational teams.
To align your developers and Ops and adopt the agile methodology, communication is essential, but you will also need tools to set everything up.
DevOps: why should you migrate to the Cloud?
DevOps and the Cloud
We hear more and more about Cloud but what does it change for DevOps and who are the Cloud providers on the market? Cloud providers are remote hosting solutions, meaning that data and tools are stored in data centers outside the company.
Cloud and DevOps are independent but are complementary strategies because to remain competitive in the market, companies must review their approach of work. Production cycles must be reduced to make constant improvements for end-users. The Cloud directly addresses this need for agility. To picture it, if the cloud was an instrument, DevOps would be the musician who plays it. As with the Formula 1 paddock, the Ops can focus on bringing new features into production instead of thinking about shutting down physical servers. Indeed, load balancing and redundancy issues, for example, are natively taken into account in this context.
There are three main cloud providers on the market: Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure, and AWS. They offer all the tools mentioned above and many others.
Conclusion
DevOps is an increasingly popular methodology that aims to connect developers and operators into a cohesive unit. It’s uniquely differentiated from traditional IT operations and complements (but is not the same as) agile.
Would you consider your IT department to be DevOps adopters? Please tell your story in the comments.