What Is DevOps?
DevOps is a set of practices, tools, and a cultural philosophy that automate and integrate the
processes between software development and IT teams. It emphasizes team empowerment,
cross-team communication and collaboration, and technology automation.
The DevOps movement began around 2007 when the software development and IT operations
communities raised concerns about the traditional software development model, where
developers who wrote code worked apart from operations who deployed and supported the
code. The term DevOps, a combination of the word’s development and operations, reflects the
process of integrating these disciplines into one, continuous process.
How does DevOps work?
A DevOps team includes developers and IT operations working collaboratively
throughout the product life cycle, in order to increase the speed and quality of software
deployment. It’s a new way of working, a cultural shift, that has significant implications
for teams and the organizations, they work for.
● DevOps teams use tools to automate and accelerate processes, which helps to
increase reliability.
● DevOps toolchain helps teams tackle important DevOps fundamentals including
continuous integration, continuous delivery, automation, and collaboration.
● DevOps values are sometimes applied to teams other than development.
The DevOps lifecycle:
Plan
DevOps teams should adopt agile practices to improve speed and quality. Agile is an
iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams
break work into smaller pieces to deliver incremental value.
Build
Git is a free and open-source version control system. It offers excellent support for
branching, merging, and rewriting repository history, which has led to many innovative
and powerful workflows and tools for the development build process
Continuous integration and delivery
CI/CD allows teams to release quality products frequently and predictably, from source
code repository to production with automated workflows. Teams can merge code
changes frequently, deploy feature flags, and incorporate end-to-end testing.
Monitor and alert
Quickly identify and resolve issues that impact product uptime, speed, and functionality.
Automatically notify your team of changes, high-risk actions, or failures, so you can keep
services on.
Operate
Manage the end-to-end delivery of IT services to customers. This includes the practices
involved in design, implementation, configuration, deployment, and maintenance of all IT
infrastructure that supports an organization’s services.
Continuous feedback
DevOps teams should evaluate each release and generate reports to improve future
releases. By gathering continuous feedback, teams can improve their processes and
incorporate customer feedback to improve the next release.
What are the benefits of DevOps?
Speed
Teams that practice DevOps release deliverables more frequently, with higher quality
and stability.
Improved collaboration
The foundation of DevOps is a culture of collaboration between developers and
operations teams, who share responsibilities and combine work. This makes teams
more efficient and saves time related to work handoffs and creating code that is
designed for the environment where it runs.
Rapid deployment
By increasing the frequency and velocity of releases, DevOps teams improve products
rapidly. A competitive advantage can be gained by quickly releasing new features and
repairing bugs.
Quality and reliability
Practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery ensure changes are
functional and safe, which improves the quality of a software product. Monitoring helps
teams keep informed of performance in real-time.
Security
By integrating security into a continuous integration, continuous delivery, and
continuous deployment pipeline, Dev Security Ops is an active, integrated part of the
development process. Security is built into the product by integrating active security
audits and security testing into agile development and DevOps workflows.