What is DevOps?
DevOps is the combination of software development (Development) and operations (Operations). It represents a culture that emphasizes communication and collaboration between software developers (Dev) and IT operations technical staff (Ops); it aims to make the process of building, testing, and releasing software faster, more frequent, and more reliable by automating software delivery and architecture changes . Gartner Consulting believes that DevOps represents a trend of changing IT culture. DevOps can be well-explained as people working together to quickly conceive, build, and deliver secure software. DevOps practices enable software development (dev) and operations (ops) teams to speed up delivery through automation, collaboration, rapid feedback, and iterative improvement.
Originating from the agile methodology in software development, DevOps processes expand the cross-functional approach to build and deliver applications more quickly and iteratively. When adopting DevOps development processes, you are deciding to improve the process and value delivery of your applications by encouraging a more collaborative environment at all stages of the development cycle.
What are the core principles of DevOps?
The DevOps approach includes four key principles that guide the effectiveness and efficiency of application development and deployment.
Automation of the software development lifecycle . This includes automated testing, building, releasing, configuring development environments, and other manual tasks that may slow down the software delivery process or introduce human errors into the software delivery process.
Collaboration and communication . A good DevOps team has automation, but a great DevOps team also has effective collaboration and communication.
Continuous improvement and waste reduction . From automating repetitive tasks to observing performance metrics to find ways to reduce release times or mean time to repair, high-performing DevOps teams are constantly looking for areas to improve.
High focus on user requirements through short feedback loops . Through automation, improved communication and collaboration, and continuous improvement, DevOps teams can take the time to focus on what users really want and how to deliver it to them.
By adopting these principles, organizations can improve code quality, shorten time to market, and conduct better application planning.
What stages will the development of DevOps go through?
As DevOps evolves, its complexity increases. This complexity is driven by two factors:
Organizations are moving from monolithic architectures to microservices architectures . As DevOps matures, each project in an organization requires more and more DevOps tools.
The result of more projects and more tools per project is an exponential increase in the number of tool integrations in the project . This requires changing the way organizations adopt DevOps tools.
This evolution has gone through the following four phases:
Phase 1: Bring Your Own DevOps
In the Bring Your Own DevOps phase, each team chose their own tools. This approach led to issues when teams tried to work together because they were unfamiliar with the tools used by other teams.
Phase 2: Best-of-Breed DevOps
To address the challenge of using different tools, organizations moved to the second phase, Best-of-Breed DevOps. In this phase, organizations standardized on a common set of tools and used the best-suited tool for each phase of the DevOps lifecycle. It helped teams collaborate with each other, but the problem then became moving software changes through the tools for each phase.
Phase 3: Do-It-Yourself (DIY) DevOps
To solve this issue, organizations adopted DIY DevOps, building on and between their tools. They did a lot of custom work to integrate their DevOps point solutions. However, since these tools were developed independently without considering integration, they were never a perfect fit. For many organizations, maintaining DIY DevOps represented significant work, leading to higher costs as engineers had to maintain tool integrations instead of focusing on core software products.
Phase 4: DevOps Platform
The single application platform approach improves team experience and business efficiency. DevOps platforms replace DIY DevOps, allowing visibility and control across all stages of the DevOps lifecycle.
By enabling all teams (development, operations, IT, security, and business) to collaboratively plan, build, secure, and deploy software across an end-to-end unified system, DevOps platforms represent the potential to achieve complete DevOps.
What is a DevOps platform?
DevOps brings human silos together, and a DevOps platform does the same for tools. Many teams start their DevOps journey with different sets of tools, all of which have to be maintained, with many lacking integration. DevOps platforms centralize tools into one application for unmatched collaboration, visibility, and development speed. A DevOps platform is about how modern software should be created, secured, released, and monitored in a repeatable way. True DevOps platforms enable teams to iterate faster and innovate together as everyone can contribute.
Why is DevOps important?
DevOps is important because it has the potential to help organizations stand out from competitors by responding to business needs faster. DevOps is a new and better way to build software, improving end-to-end collaboration not only between development and operations teams but also with security (sometimes called DevSecOps), testing (Quality Assurance or QA), version control, and cross-team collaboration features such as ChatOps. DevOps brings better software products and more successful implementations.
At its core, DevOps is a practice. It is based on the premise that application and service delivery organizations work better when software development teams truly collaborate and practice Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). This means that at the end of each iteration, no matter how short, the software can be put into production—even if it is not deployed to production every time.
Large organizations undergo DevOps transformations to address common and fundamental issues in enterprise software creation. When developers create new software, they code and test it in a developer environment, which is offline and allows them to debug, tweak code, and refine requirements without jeopardizing their business, government agencies, healthcare, or educational institutions.
However, problems arise when it comes time to deploy new software or code to the real environment because the developer environment is not exactly the same as the ever-changing production environment. This can lead to genuine headaches or even heartbreaks. Deployment failures can result in issues that require significant time and money to fix. Historically, this problem has been exacerbated by bundling large changes into infrequent releases.
The operations team is responsible for ensuring that products run reliably in production and performing proper checks and balances to ensure reliable deployments. Friction can occur between operations and development teams as they try to iterate and get their code changes into production as quickly as possible.