What is DevOps?

DevOps is a rapid approach to software delivery that supports the agile software development methodology process. It improves collaboration between development and operations teams, accelerates deployment cycles, and enables enterprises to deliver high-quality applications quickly and accurately without compromising quality. In addition to cross-team collaboration, companies need to understand the tools and practices that are key to the DevOps lifecycle.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

Continuous integration and continuous deployment is an integral parts of the DevOps lifecycle. These two approaches allow code to be integrated and deployed without delay, improving software delivery frequency and quality. It cuts development time from months or weeks to days or even hours. Application changes are made more quickly and often reach the production environment. This speeds up the prototype development cycle and shortens deployment time.

Benefits of DevOps

• Speed: DevOps practices allow you to move at the speed you need to innovate faster, adapt better to changing markets, and become more efficient in delivering business results.
• Fast delivery: When you increase the release pace, you can improve your product faster and create a competitive advantage.
• Reliability: DevOps practices like continuous integration and delivery can ensure the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes, so you can reliably deliver faster while maintaining an optimal end-user experience.
• Improved collaboration: In the DevOps model, developers and operations teams work closely together, share responsibilities, and combine their workflows. This reduces inefficiency and saves time.
• Security: With automated, integrated security testing tools, you can embrace the DevOps model without sacrificing security.

DevOps is a direct descendant of agile software development, born out of the need to keep up with the increased speed of software development and the throughput of agile methods. Advances in agile development have highlighted the need for a more holistic approach to the software delivery lifecycle, resulting in DevOps.

"Agile development" is an umbrella term for several iterative software development methodologies, many of which have carried over into DevOps:

• Scrum - a framework in which people can solve complex adaptive problems while delivering products of the highest possible value.
• Kanban — a method for managing product creation with an emphasis on continuous delivery without overburdening the development team. Like Scrum, Kanban is a process designed to help teams work together more effectively.
• Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) - a set of organizational and work practices to guide businesses in scaling lean and agile methods. SAFe is one of a growing number of frameworks trying to solve the problems they face when scaling beyond a single team.
• Lean development – ​​translation of lean production principles and procedures into the software development domain. Lean offers a conceptual framework, values, precepts, and best practices derived from the experience that supports agile organizations.
• Extreme Programming (XP) - a software development methodology designed to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. XP promotes frequent releases in short development cycles to improve productivity and establish checkpoints for accepting new customer requirements. Other elements of extreme programming include pair programming or performing extensive code review, unit testing the entire code rather than programming functions until they are needed, flat management structure, code simplicity and clarity, and anticipating changes in customer requirements over time. A better understanding of the problem and frequent communication with the customer.

How does DevOps work?

DevOps is a methodology designed to improve work throughout the software development lifecycle. You can think of the DevOps process as an endless loop that includes the following steps: plan, code, build, test, release, deploy, operate, monitor, and—through feedback—a program that resets the loop.

Ideally, DevOps means that the IT team writes software that perfectly meets user requirements, deploys without wasting time, and runs optimally on the first try. Organizations use a combination of culture and technology to achieve this goal.

For software to conform to expectations, developers and stakeholders communicate about the project, and developers work on minor updates that run independently.

To avoid waiting times, IT teams use CI/CD pipelines and other automation to move code from one development and deployment step to another. Teams review changes immediately and can enforce policies to ensure releases meet standards.

It's easy to write software quickly; writing software that works is another story. To deploy good code to production, DevOps adherents use containers or other methods to make software behave the same way from development to testing to production. They deploy changes individually to keep issues trackable. Teams rely on configuration management for consistent deployments and hosting environments. Issues they discover in live operations lead to code improvements, often through integrity postmortems and ongoing feedback channels.

Software developer can support live software, which puts the onus on them to handle the runtime aspects. IT operations managers can attend software design meetings and offer advice on using resources efficiently and securely. Anyone can contribute to clean autopsies. The more these specialists work together and share skills, the more they can support a DevOps culture.

Wrapping up

Trying to achieve faster product development without compromising product quality is a challenge the company faces at the product development and delivery stage. Along with more rapid product development, it should ensure that the process is cheap and less time-consuming, ensuring more rapid testing and delivery.