What is DevOps?
By combining and automating the work of IT operations and software development teams, DevOps is a software development methodology that speeds up the delivery of higher-quality applications and services.
Software development becomes more effective, quicker, and more reliable with shared tools and practices, including small but frequent updates.
DevOps, or development operations, by definition describes both a software development process and an organizational culture shift that promotes coordination and collaboration between the IT operations and development teams, two groups that have traditionally worked independently or in silos.
The best DevOps practices and cultures actually include inputs from all application stakeholders throughout the lifecycle of software development, beyond development practices and operations. This includes line-of-business teams, users, customers, security, compliance, governance, risk management, and platform and infrastructure engineers.
The software delivery process has evolved over the past twenty plus years, and the current condition is represented by the principles of DevOps. Large-scale application-wide code releases that occur every few months or even years have given way to iterative, smaller feature or functional updates that can occur daily or multiple times a day.
In the end, DevOps is about satisfying the always growing needs of software users for regular, creative new features as well as continuous availability and performance.
How does DevOps work?
Using a variety of automation tools, the DevOps software development technique enhances the cooperation between operations and development teams. Several DevOps Lifecycle steps are used in the implementation of these automation solutions.
The SDLC lifecycle is broken up into the stages in DevOps:
1. Continuous Development:
For this stage, code is committed to version control tools like Git or SVN for maintaining the various code versions, as well as tools like Ant, Maven, and Gradle for creating and converting the code into an executable file so that it can be tested by the QAs.
2. Continuous Integration:
The DevOps Lifecycle’s Stage is a crucial point. It is crucial to automating the entire DevOps Process because it integrates the various stages of the DevOps lifecycle.
3. Continuous Deployment:
The environment or the application is containerized, the code is built, and the desired server is then pushed onto the server at this stage. Configuration Management, Virtualization, and Containerization are the main processes in this stage.
4. Continuous Testing:
This phase focuses on automated testing of the developer-pushed application. If there is a problem, the integration tool receives the message back and forwards it to the developer. In the event that the test is successful, Integration-tool receives the message and pushes the build to the production server.
5. Continuous Monitoring:
The stage keeps an eye out for glitches or failures in the deployed application. It can also be configured to gather input from users. The developers receive the gathered data after which they can use it to enhance the application.
How we got to DevOps
The waterfall methodology, a linear approach to large-scale development projects, was used to develop and update the majority of software before 2000. Developers of software spent months creating sizable chunks of fresh code that affected the entire application lifecycle. Because the modifications were so extensive, they had to spend additional months incorporating the new code into the code base.
Then, security, operations, quality assurance (QA), and quality control teams spent more time testing the code. Between software releases, there were often several significant patches or bug fixes, which lasted for months or even years. It was frequently associated with this big bang approach to feature delivery, including complex and risky deployment plans, difficult-to-schedule interlocks with upstream and downstream systems, and IT’s great hope that business requirements had not significantly changed in the months leading up to production going live or the general availability (GA) version.
Agile development
In the early 2000s, development teams started using agile software development approaches to expedite development and enhance quality. These approaches emphasize smaller, more frequent updates to the application code base and are iterative as opposed to linear. The most prominent DevOps approaches are continuous delivery and integration (CI/CD).
Little bits of new code are automatically integrated, tested, and ready for deployment to the production environment when they are often merged into the code base using continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). Agile divided risks by repurposing the Big Bang strategy into a sequence of smaller snaps.
The more effectively these agile development practices, for instance, made still-siloed IT operations, system provisioning, configuration, acceptance testing, management, and monitoring the focus of the next bottleneck in the software delivery lifecycle.
DevOps evolved from agile, essentially. It added new tools and processes that would allow CI/CD to continuously iterate and automate throughout the software delivery lifecycle. And at each stage of the process, it closely collaborated with development and operations.
DevOps methodologies
Agile software development’s direct ancestor, DevOps, was developed in response to the need to keep up with the increased throughput of agile methodologies. DevOps resulted from the need for a more comprehensive approach to the software delivery life cycle brought on by advancements in agile development.
Several iterative software development methodologies, many of which have been adopted by DevOps, are collectively referred to as “agile development”:
- Scrum: a framework that enables people to solve challenging adaptive problems while producing goods of the highest caliber.
- Kanban: a technique for overseeing product development that prioritizes ongoing delivery without burdening the development team. Kanban is a method created to facilitate teamwork more effectively, similar to Scrum.
- Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe): a collection of workflow and organizational patterns designed to help businesses scale their agile and lean practices. A growing number of frameworks, including SAFe, aim to solve the issues brought on by scaling multiple teams.
- Lean development: a software development domain translation of lean manufacturing principles and practices. Agile organizations can benefit from Lean’s conceptual framework, values, and principles as well as best practices based on experience.
- Extreme programming (XP): a technique for developing software that aims to increase software quality and adaptability to shifting client needs. XP promotes quick development cycles with frequent releases in an effort to boost output and set benchmarks for accepting new client requirements. Extreme programming also involves doing extensive code reviews or programming in pairs, unit testing all of the code, delaying programming features until they are needed, having a flat management structure, expecting changes in the customer’s requirements as the problem is better understood over time, and communicating with the customer often.
How to adopt DevOps
You need to adopt a DevOps culture in order to fully implement it. Deep adjustments to how people collaborate and work are necessary for developing a DevOps culture. Organizations that adopt a DevOps culture foster the development of high-performing teams. You won’t reap the full advantages of DevOps if you adopt its practices, which use technology to automate and optimize processes. Instead, you need to change the organization’s and its employees’ culture.
A DevOps culture should include the following procedures:
- Collaboration, visibility, and alignment: Teamwork is a defining characteristic of a strong DevOps culture. The first step in collaboration is visibility. IT, development, and other teams should communicate with one another about their DevOps priorities, procedures, and issues. They are in a better position to agree on objectives and success metrics that pertain to the business by organizing their work together.
- Shifts in scope and accountability: Teams that are in alignment take initiative and participate in all stages of the lifecycle, not just the ones that are essential to their jobs. For instance, during the operate phase, developers are held responsible for the performance and stability of their modifications in addition to the creativity and quality that were established during the develop phase. IT managers also make sure that during the plan and develop stage, governance, security, and compliance are taken into consideration.
- Shorter release cycles: By releasing software in brief cycles, DevOps teams can stay agile. Since progress is incremental and has a smaller effect on system stability, shorter release cycles make planning and risk management simpler. Organizations can adapt and respond to changing customer needs and competitive pressure by shortening the release cycle.
- Continuous learning: DevOps teams that perform well develop a growth mindset. They incorporate learning into their processes and fail quickly. They work to continuously raise standards, boost client satisfaction, quicken market adaptation, and innovate.
What are the benefits of DevOps?
99 percent of respondents to Atlassian’s 2020 DevOps Trends survey said that the program had benefited their company. DevOps has advantages like quicker and simpler releases, improved security, higher-quality products, and happier teams and customers as a result.
1. Speed
Deliverables with higher quality and stability are released more frequently by teams that use DevOps. Elite teams actually deploy 208 times more frequently and 106 times faster than underperforming teams, according to the DORA 2019 State of DevOps report. Teams can create, test, and deliver software using automated tools thanks to continuous delivery.
2. Improved collaboration
A culture of cooperation between operations teams and developers, sharing duties and combining work, forms the basis of DevOps. Teams become more productive as a result, saving time on work handoffs and writing code that is tailored to the environment in which they operate.
3. Rapid deployment
Teams working on DevOps quickly improve products by boosting the frequency and velocity of releases. It is possible to obtain a competitive edge by promptly deploying new features and fixing bugs.
4. Quality and reliability
A software product’s quality is raised via methods like continuous integration and delivery, which guarantee that modifications are secure and functional. Teams may stay updated on performance in real time with the use of monitoring.
5. Security
DevSecOps becomes an active, integrated component of the development process by incorporating security into a continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment pipeline. By incorporating security testing and active security audits into DevOps and agile development processes, security is ingrained into the product.
DevOps culture
Combining the development team and the operations team, forcing them to work together and communicate more quickly, is the quickest way to create a DevOps environment. However, you must adhere to some fundamental rules in order to create a DevOps culture.
1. Foster a Collaborative Environment
DevOps aims to combine development and operations to form a team that works together toward accomplishing shared goals, which is the main idea behind DevOps. To do this, brands must encourage development and operations to regularly communicate, exchange ideas, and solve problems together. Companies can align their people, processes, and tools toward a unified focus on the customer, said Jacob Lehrbaum, vice president of developer relations at Salesforce, breaking down silos and bringing development and operations teams together. “Aligning processes helps minimize surprises along the way by creating a fluid experience throughout the entire development and deployment process.”
2. Impose End-to-End Responsibility
Developers and operations had distinct roles in the traditional software development model. However, both groups in DevOps work together as a single, fully accountable team for the application. The control and responsibility of services from concept to grave is one of DevOps ‘guiding principles. Developers traditionally write code and operations deploy it, which creates a variety of inefficiencies, including performance-related issues, and unpredictable environments, according to Dave Blakey, co-founder and head of technology at Snapt Inc.
3. Encourage Continuous Improvement
As part of their end-to-end responsibility, companies also have an ongoing obligation to adjust to shifting conditions, such as new technological advancements, shifting consumer demands, or modifications to laws.
Continuous improvement is a key component of DevOps since it helps to maximize delivery speed, cost, and performance.
4. Automate (Almost) Everything
Brands must use automated processes to maintain continuous improvement while maintaining high cycle rates and the ability to respond to customer feedback right away. Thankfully, automated tools have improved significantly to streamline processes, including the CI/CD pipeline.
5. Focus on the Customer’s Needs
DevOps requires brands to operate as lean startups that can continuously innovate, change when a strategy is ineffective, and invest in features to satisfy customers.
DevOps teams must have a pulse in order to consistently address consumer demands that are constantly changing. To meet performance goals, the data collected through automated processes must be constantly reviewed.
DevOps Practices
The following are DevOps best practices:
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Delivery
- Microservices
- Infrastructure as Code
- Monitoring and Logging
- Communication and Collaboration
Continuous Integration
A method of continuous integration in software development involves regularly combining code changes with a central repository, which is followed by automated builds and tests. Continuous integration’s main objectives are to find and fix bugs more quickly, increase software quality, and shorten the time it takes to validate and update new software.
Continuous Delivery
Code changes are automatically created, tested, and prepared for release to production in a practice known as continuous delivery in software development. By deploying all code changes after the build stage to a testing environment and/or a production environment, it expands on continuous integration. Developers always have a deployment-ready build artifact that has passed through a standardized test process when continuous delivery is properly implemented.
Microservices
A single application can be constructed as a set of small services using the microservices architecture. Each service communicates with other services using a well-defined interface, typically an HTTP-based application programming interface (API), and operates independently. Each service has a unique purpose, and microservices are built around business capabilities. Microservices can be written as a single service, as a group of services, or as a set of services using a variety of frameworks or programming languages.
Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as code is a method for deploying and managing infrastructure using code and software development methods like version control and continuous integration. Instead of having to manually set up and configure resources, the cloud’s API-driven model enables developers and system administrators to interact with infrastructure programmatically and scale. Therefore, engineers can interact with infrastructure using code-based tools and approach it in a manner similar to application code. Because they are defined by code, infrastructure, and servers can be quickly deployed using standardized patterns, updated with the most recent patches and versions, or copied in repeatable ways.
DevOps Security and DevSecOps
The discipline and practice of protecting the entire DevOps environment through strategies, policies, processes, and technology is known as DevOps security or DevSecOps. Security should be integrated into every stage of the DevOps life cycle, including design, build, test, release, support, maintenance, and beyond, according to DevSecOps philosophy.
Traditional security operates from the perspective that security flaws can be identified and fixed before release once a system has been designed and fixed. Traditional security practices are too late in the development cycle and are too slow for the design and release of software created by iteration because of the change to a DevOps model. They can thus become a significant slow-moving obstacle to the delivery of applications and services.
Everyone on a DevOps team places their focus on security with DevSecOps. DevSecOps aims to put security decisions into practice quickly and easily without sacrificing safety. Release engineers and security teams collaborate in DevSecOps in a permanent, flexible manner. The terms “building secure code” and “speed of delivery” are combined into a single, straightforward procedure. Iterations of security testing are done to avoid sluggish delivery times. Critical security issues are addressed as they become apparent, not after a threat or compromise has been made.
DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE)
System administrators might otherwise manually perform tasks like production system management, change management, incident response, and even emergency response, but site reliability engineering (SRE) uses software engineering techniques to automate these tasks. The goal of SRE is to make an engineer out of the traditional system administrator.
SRE aims to strike a balance between an organization’s desire for quick application development and its need to meet the performance and availability standards set forth in service level agreements (SLAs) with customers.
An error budget, or acceptable level of operational risk caused by applications, is set by site reliability engineers to achieve this balance, which is automated to meet that level.
SRE can act as a link between development and operations on a cross-functional DevOps team. SRE gives teams the automated tools and data they need to expedite the delivery of new features and code updates via the DevOps pipeline while adhering to the SLAs of the company.
How to find the right DevOps tools
Effective tools are essential for helping teams quickly and reliably deploy and innovate for their customers, according to DevOps practices. These tools should help teams manage large-scale, automate manual tasks, and give engineers complete control over DevOps ‘high-speed environment.
These are included in the DevOps workflow:
- Planning: The DevOps team needs schedule planning and task tracking tools to make sure they are aware of the tasks that are in hand, how much work is being done, and whether there is a chance of falling behind schedule. DevOps teams can achieve a smooth, effective project management cycle with the aid of tools like Jira and Confluence, which also guarantee timely product delivery.
- Build and delivery: Developers require quick deployment of testing and development environments, and they don’t want to wait for costly repairs. Repeatable development, build, test, and production environments are provided by Docker containerization, which ensures consistency across multiple development and release cycles. Kubernetes, Terraform, Chef, Ansible, and Puppet are other well-known tools for this phase.
- Testing: Find tools that can reduce the amount of time and effort spent testing without sacrificing the code quality or user experience, like Jenkins, CircleCI, and GitLab CI.
- Software monitoring and logging: Once software is moved into production, ongoing monitoring is required to ensure stable performance and increased client satisfaction. Additionally, this stage involves conducting performance analysis and logging, generating smart alerts for various issues, gathering customer feedback, and more. Prometheus, Grafana, Elastic (ELK) Stack, Splunk, and Sumo Logic are among the tools used to accomplish these tasks.
10 DevOps Tools
1. Docker
DevOps and modern software development depend on Docker. It can make managing applications in a variety of settings simpler and more effective. Docker containers keep an app’s dependencies in stock and ensure accurate deployments from development to production.
2. Git
Git is a distributed version management system that is freely available to all users and is open-source. It is made to work quickly and effectively on little to large jobs. It was created to help programmers coordinate their work. You can collaborate and keep track of your team members in the same workspace thanks to version control. For the DevOps tool, it serves as a vital distributed version control system.
3. GitHub
GitHub is one of the top DevOps automation tools for developer collaboration since 2000. Developers can quickly iterate on already-existing code (within minutes, with team members being immediately notified), and they can quickly rollback in the event of an error or unintended consequence.
4. BitBucket
Another popular code repository management solution with built-in CI/CD and native Jira integration is BitBucket. As a component of Atlassian’s Open DevOps offering, it provides numerous collaboration features and interoperability with other products.
5. Puppet
Puppets are necessary because they make it easier for administrators to define infrastructure as code and manage the management and orchestration of complex IT infrastructures. It makes configuration consistency and repeatability consistent between servers, cloud instances, and containers. Businesses increasingly rely on diverse, dynamic, and hybrid infrastructures.
6. Chef
A good tool for achieving consistency, speed, and scale is a chef. The chef is open-source software that runs on the cloud. This technology develops fundamental building pieces, like recipes and cookbooks, using Ruby encoding. The chef is a tool for automating infrastructure management that helps to eliminate tedious and manual duties.
7. Kubernetes
DevOps teams have a very favorable opinion of it as a container orchestration and automation platform. It effectively integrates with Docker and manages containers on a large scale. Kubernetes manages hundreds of containers by automating distribution and scheduling across clusters, making it easier to deploy container-based software to clusters as opposed to individual workstations.
8. Ansible
Ansible, supported by RedHat, is an adaptable and strong tool for automating infrastructure management and configuration chores. It has become a favored tool among IT operators and is compatible with both on-premises and cloud resources. You can find helpful Ansible content here if you’re interested in Ansible.
9. Jenkins
Its significance stems from its ability to facilitate continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines through its powerful automation server. Jenkins simplifies software development by automating tasks like creating, testing, and deploying code changes, ensuring that software is quickly and highly valued. Effective CI/CD processes are required to meet the increasing complexity of modern applications.
10. Splunk
Splunk is made to produce strong insights, enabling businesses to make wise decisions. It is employed for highly accurate data searching, tracking, and analysis (down to the decimal places). The web-based interface is both attractive and straightforward, enabling users to analyze data from servers, networks, and apps.
