In the growing era of Information and Technology, software development has a prime importance. It is basically the development and maintenance of the software applications. It allows people, businesses, and organizations to perform tasks quickly and efficiently. Software development is itself a whole process that is being automated by using DevOps.
In this article, we are focused on covering the whole scope of DevOps with the help of the following main headings:
- What is DevOps?
- How does DevOps Work?
- Lifecycle of DevOps
- Key Principles of DevOps
- Key Practices in DevOps
- DevOps Tools
- Benefits of DevOps
- Challenges in Adopting DevOps
- How does DevOps relate to DevSecOps?
1. What is DevOps?
DevOps is the combination of two words, “Development” and “Operations”. It is the union of an organization’s development and IT operations teams to enhance the ability to produce and deliver software products and services efficiently within a shorter period.
DevOps itself is not a tool or technology, rather it is a set of principles or approaches that are combined for the fastest delivery of services, using different automation tools. With the help of mutual collaboration between both teams the development and delivery process becomes easy and smooth resulting in efficient production.
2. How Does DevOps Work?
DevOps works by bringing an organization’s IT and development teams together by removing the silo between them. Before DevOps, in a traditional work environment, both these teams used to work in isolation without direct reporting to each other on a regular basis. To share updates, they would need to arrange meetings, emails, and conferences which cost a lot of time.
The adoption of DevOps within an organization shifts the departmental goals to the organizational goals, which results in the same mutual concerns of one big team and creates a cohesive development cycle. This increases the speed of production, a more efficient team, and an improved feedback system.
Issues are monitored early and fixed efficiently due to regular updates to both the working teams. This methodology results in the overall efficiency of the organization. For these purposes, they use different technology tools and automation processes.
3. Lifecycle of DevOps
The lifecycle of DevOps consists of four phases, making a loop and eventually providing a feedback loop for regular monitoring and delivery of products and services. These phases are listed and explained below:
A. Planning
This is the first phase in the lifecycle of DevOps. The stakeholders from the organization, development, and IT teams come together to form the plan for the features that the next development will include. It also includes design, development, and secure management of the data of the project with teams. Prioritizing the tasks and keeping track of the process throughout is also the key feature of this phase.
B. Development
The second phase is development, which includes coding, testing, and building. The changes made in the code are updated in the central repository regularly. The automation tool is used to fetch the code and test for its credibility to build the best project. After passing the test, the product is sent to the building phase.
C. Release and Deploy
The third phase in the DevOps lifecycle includes two processes – release and deployment. The product after qualifying the test phase is sent to the production environment where the DevOps teams decide to release and deploy the product according to their set preferences to launch the best version of the product.
D. Continuous Monitoring
The final phase in the lifecycle of DevOps is continuous monitoring. It ensures the check and balance of the product’s performance. The product is overseen continuously to check for its health and ensure security, in case of any anomaly it is reported back to the respective team for fixation.
4. Key Principles of DevOps
There are some key principles of DevOps which are listed and explained below in detail:
A. Culture Shift
Adopting DevOps means a change of culture within the organization. The Development and IT teams have to work together without any physical barriers between them. They have to shift the thinking process from the team level to the organization level, as now the whole organization shares the same goal and their progress is monitored collectively.
All the teams and members are responsible for producing good products by minimizing the possible shortcomings in the framework. There must be a collaboration between all the members, which can be adopted effectively by appreciating the good work, discussing and improving the lacking timely.
B. Automation
The DevOps model emphasizes greatly automation to speed up the whole process. This will improve the speed of deployment by reducing the time consumed on repetitive tasks. Testing processes can be automated to send feedback to the developers so that they can make timely improvements in case of shortcomings.
C. Configuration Management
Configuration management is the consistency in delivering the product with efficiency and maintaining the standard throughout the life cycle of the product.
5. Key Practices in DevOps
There are some key practices that make DevOps an efficient system:
A. Continuous Testing
Continuous testing improves the efficiency of software development by continuously testing and providing feedback for the improvement of bugs before they cause severe damage to the product. Whenever any code changes are made, they are being tested at the same time, and this happens throughout the development lifecycle of software.
B. Continuous Integration
Continuous integration refers to obtaining feedback from the stakeholders by feeding changes made in the system to the central repository. This leads to timely improvements in the system.
C. Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery is the DevOps practice that enables continuous delivery of the changes made in the code to the pre-production environment. In this way, developers will be ready to deploy an updated model of the product that has gone through and passed the proper testing process.
D. Microservices
Microservices is an approach in which a set of small services are combined to form a single application. Each small service operates on it and communicates with others using a lightweight mechanism, for example application programming interface (API). Organizations use this approach to make their product quickly innovative and flexible.
E. Logging and Monitoring
In DevOps, one key practice is logging and monitoring to keep an eye on the experience and response of the product’s end user. They can be familiarized with the impacts of updates made in the product on the user. This practice also strengthens their feedback loop and reduces the space for errors.
F. Building a Secure DevOps Model
DevOps also enables the organization to build the model securely by cooperating with its security teams in the model too. The provision of security throughout the lifecycle of a product is of prime importance.
G. Communication and Collaboration
Communication and collaboration is the key practice in DevOps to create a transparent environment for collaboration and timely communication between all the members of the working teams.
6. DevOps Tools
DevOps is not a tool itself, but different automation tools help to enhance the efficiency of its processes. Some of the popular automation tools used in DevOps are listed below:
- Docker: Docker is a software platform that helps to convert an application into a single software package called a container.
- Kubernetes – Kubernetes is a tool that is used in DevOps processes to automate, scale, and manage containerized applications.
- Git – Git is a DevOps efficient tool that is used for the management of source code.
- Jenkins – Jenkins is a popular automation server that makes it easier for DevOps Engineers to work efficiently in the development and deployment process of the product.
- Puppet – Puppet is also a DevOps tool that is used in the management of software configuration.
7. Benefits of DevOps
Some of the obvious benefits provided by DevOps are listed below:
- Improved Collaboration: DevOps removes the typical boundaries between development and IT operations teams by merging them together and providing a collaborative work culture.
- Speed: It enhances the production speed by implementing continuous testing, feedback, and improvements in the software.
- Efficiency: It enhances the efficiency of the system.
- Security: It enables a secure environment for development and production using security tools in collaboration.
8. Challenges in Adopting DevOps
Major challenges in adopting DevOps are culture shift, adoption of new tools, changing management strategies, and changing processes and metrics. However, these challenges can be overcome by experts with their insights by convincing and training their teams to adopt changes in the work environment efficiently.
9. How Does DevOps relate to DevSecOps?
DevOps focuses on the automation and quick delivery of the software, while DevSecOps puts security throughout the process as first priority. Both these processes have similar goals, with a slight change in their methods of operation.
Conclusion
DevOps is the combination of the Development and IT operations teams of an organization to automate the software development process. It has brought many potential benefits to the software development industry.
It has enabled the fast, efficient, secure, and reliable delivery of services. Furthermore, it has vanished the typical barriers between the operational teams of an organization by bringing into account the communication and collaboration culture.