What is DevOps?

Introduction

The function of DevOps is to improve the collaboration between the traditionally soiled development and operations functions. DevOps is all about trust, communication and the merging of two different disciplines inside IT. On one side, we have developers and on the other side we have operations. DevOps is an extension of Agile software development principles – allowing us to build, deploy and change our software with accelerated delivery cycle times.

Part 1: What Is DevOps?

Traditional Development and Operations teams worked in such a way that Development teams created a solution for production and when it was finished they handed over to the Operations team. The Operations team then started with preparation to implement the project in the production environment and manually changed the configuration files and other data in order to comply for deployment. This caused a lot of duplication and other similar issues which were very hard to resolve due to different files and environments.

DevOps is a software development method that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and information technology (IT) professionals thereby:

• Enables rapid evolution of products and services
• Lower the risk, enhance quality across portfolios, and reduce cost

DevOps integration targets product delivery, quality testing, feature development and maintenance releases in order to improve reliability and security as well as faster development and deployment cycles. The adoption of DevOps is being motivated by the following factors:

• Use of Agile and other development operations
• Requirement for an expanded rate of production releases from application and business stakeholders
• Extensive possibility of visualised and cloud infrastructure from internal and external providers
• Enlarged usage of data centre automation and configuration management tools

Part 2: Principles of DevOps

One of the commonly cited DevOps principles is “Infrastructure as a code” (IaC). Another major principle is to get the fast feedback throughout every phase of the software lifecycle. Feedback helps to achieve the higher quality of code and to reduce as many bugs as possible in the production. Moreover, the DevOps practices helps to gather data to identify, diagnose, and resolve issues quickly.

• Develop and test in an environment similar to production
• Frequent Build deployment
• Continuous validation of operation quality
• Strengthen feedback loops

Part 3: Why DevOps Exist

There is a gap between the Developers and the Operations team. With the implementation of DevOps, we can see:

• Close collaboration between Developers and Operations to Developers work with to understand the impact of code changes
• Developers work is done in an environment which is very close to the production environment
• Developers are focused on the metrics required by the Ops team
• More transparency for Operations on infrastructure needs
• Higher level of automation on deployment
• The pipeline of Dev – Test – Prod is closely monitored for each deployment with immediate feedback
• Better collaboration and communication

Conclusion

DevOps is helping businesses in a tremendous way. Its bridging the gap between a Developers ‘need for change’ and Operations ‘resist to change’ and thus create a smooth path for continuous development and continuous integration. You might also be interested in taking the DevOps Self-Assessment, you can visit Microsoft’s website and gauge your readiness in the 7 key DevOps practice areas.