What is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of cultural concepts, practices, and technologies that improves an organization’s capacity to produce high-velocity applications and services, allowing it to evolve and improve products at a faster rate than traditional software development and infrastructure management methods. This speed allows businesses to provide better service to their clients and compete more effectively in the market.

How DevOps Works?

Development and operations teams are no longer “siloed” in a DevOps architecture. These two teams are sometimes combined into a single team where the engineers work across the whole application lifecycle, from development and testing to deployment and operations, and develop a diverse set of abilities that aren’t limited to a particular role.

Quality assurance and security teams may become more closely linked with development and operations, as well as throughout the application lifecycle, in some DevOps models. When everyone in a DevOps team is focused on security, this is referred to as DevSecOps.

These groups employ best practices to automate procedures that were previously manual and slow. They employ a technological stack and infrastructure that allows them to swiftly and reliably operate and evolve apps. These tools also assist engineers in independently completing tasks (such as deploying code or supplying infrastructure) that might otherwise require assistance from other teams, hence increasing a team’s efficiency.

When DevOps started.

DevOps has a simple yet revolutionary history. In 2008, Andrew Clay and Patrick Debois had a conversation that resulted in the concept of DevOps. They were concerned about Agile’s flaws and sought to come up with a better solution. The concept gradually gained traction, and following the DevOpsDays conference in Belgium in 2009, it had become quite a catchphrase.

What’s great about DevOps is that it’s more than it appears. It’s not only a cost-cutting measure; it’s also a move toward cultural change. It’s a combination of agile ideology and lean thinking. DevOps brings together the efforts of all project teams, and it does so with greater synergy.

This cross-departmental collaboration between developers, quality assurance engineers, and system administrators is even more impressive than it appears. Developers can now participate in deployment, administrators can write scripts, and QA engineers can troubleshoot issues that aren’t related to testing. Processes can be automated, and no one will have to wait since they will be able to collaborate more closely and come up with better solutions.

What are some DevOps Practices?

Continuous improvement and automation are key to DevOps approaches. Many methods concentrate on one or more stages of the growth cycle. These are some of the practices:

Continual Development – The planning and coding phases of the DevOps lifecycle are covered by this approach. Version-control techniques may be involved.

Continuous Testing – As application code is produced or changed, this method incorporates automated, prescheduled, ongoing code tests. Such tests can help to expedite the release of code to the production environment.

Continuous Integration (CI) – This approach combines configuration management (CM) tools with other test and development tools to keep track of how much code is ready for production. It entails rapid feedback between testing and development to discover and resolve code errors as rapidly as possible.

Continuous Delivery – This procedure automates the transfer of code changes to a preproduction or staging environment after they have been tested. A member of staff may then opt to push such code changes into production.

Continuous Deployment (CD) – This approach automates the release of new or updated code into production, similar to continuous delivery. Continuous deployment allows a corporation to release code or feature updates numerous times per day. Container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes can aid with continuous deployment by maintaining code consistency across many deployment platforms and environments.

Continuous Monitoring – This method entails continuous monitoring of both the running code and the infrastructure that supports it. A feedback loop in which bugs or issues are reported and subsequently reported back to development.

Infrastructure as code – This method can be used to automate the provisioning of infrastructure required for a software release during various DevOps processes. Infrastructure “code” is added by developers using their existing development tools. Developers could, for example, use Docker, Kubernetes, or OpenShift to generate a storage volume on demand. This technique also enables operations teams to keep an eye on environment setups, log changes, and make configuration rollbacks easier.

What is the DevOps Benefits?

DevOps proponents boast a host of economic and technological benefits, many of which can result in satisfied customers. The following are some of the advantages of DevOps:

• Faster and better product delivery
• Issue resolution time is shortened, and the complexity of the problem is minimised.
• Scalability and availability are improved.
• Operating settings that are more stable
• More efficient use of resources
• Automation will become more prevalent.
• Increased transparency into system results
• More innovation

Why DevOps matters?

It important because it is a great asset for businesses and is extremely practical. It also has several tangible and quantifiable advantages for the software supply chain and companies as a whole. Some of the advantages are listed below.

1. Greater Collaboration and Teamwork

DevOps eliminates the concept of silos by bringing development and operations teams together. It improves technology supply chain collaboration and communication to ensure the best potential outcome.

2. Faster Time-to-Market

Software is built faster and delivered to the market in the quickest time possible with DevOps. The increased team cohesion shortens the time it takes for a code to move from engineering to deployment, resulting in a speedier development cycle. Teams who do not employ DevOps use a variety of technologies and processes, which increases OPEX and slows releases.

3. Accelerates Time to Resolution

DevOps allows teams to fix difficulties much more quickly than before. Defects are avoided, rollbacks are reduced, and pre and post-deployment difficulties are reduced. In the event that something goes wrong – which is unavoidable – the time it takes to recover is reduced.

4. Optimizes Productivity

DevOps encourages a performance-oriented culture by embracing automation that boosts team productivity. People are no longer trapped in a cycle of waiting for other people or technology to solve the same problems. Employees are engaged in more productive and value-adding work while automation tackles repetitive duties.

5. Increases Customer Satisfaction

Its ultimate goal is to provide end-users – customers – with more value and high-quality software. It guarantees that consumers receive the greatest software in the shortest amount of time. In addition, problems are recognized early in the development process, before they reach the end-user.

6. Improves Business Value

DevOps increases corporate value by forming an interdependent team dedicated to providing products and services that fulfill customers’ needs. Teams are free to experiment in order to create better products and services.

These are some most asked questions related to DevOps. I hope these answers helped you to understand DevOps a bit better.