What is DevOps? Basics of DevOps
Today, We will learn What is DevOps, the Basics of DevOps, How DevOps is different from traditional IT, Why DevOps is required, and much more.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a collaboration between Development and IT Operations to make software production and deployment in an automated & repeatable way. DevOps helps to increase the organization’s speed to deliver software applications and services. The word “DevOps” is a combination of two words, “Development” and “Operations”.
It allows organizations to serve their customers better and compete more strongly in the market. In simple words, DevOps can be defined as an alignment of development and IT operations with better communication and collaboration.
Why is DevOps is Required?
- Before DevOps, the development and operation team worked in complete isolation.
- Testing and Deployment were isolated activities done after design-build. Hence they consumed more time than actual build cycles.
- Without using DevOps, team members are spending a large amount of their time in testing, deploying, and designing instead of building the project.
- Manual code deployment leads to human errors in production
- Coding & operation teams have their separate timelines and are not in synch causing further delays.
There is a demand to increase the rate of software delivery by business stakeholders. As per Forrester Consulting Study, Only 17% of teams can use delivery software fast enough. This proves the pain point.
How is DevOps different from traditional IT
Now in this DevOps training, let’s compare the traditional software waterfall model with DevOps to understand the changes DevOps bring.
We assume the application is scheduled to go live in 2 weeks and coding is 80% done. We assume the application is a fresh launch and the process of buying servers to ship the code has just begun.
| Old Process | DevOps |
|---|---|
| After placing an order for new servers, the Development team works on testing. The Operations team works on extensive paperwork as required in enterprises to deploy the infrastructure. | After placing an order for new servers Development and Operations team work together on the paperwork to set up the new servers. This results in better visibility of infrastructure requirements. |
| Projections about failover, redundancy, data center locations, and storage requirements are skewed as no inputs are available from developers who have deep knowledge of the application. | Projections about failover, redundancy, disaster recovery, data center locations, and storage requirements are pretty accurate due to the inputs from the developers. |
| The operations team has no clue about the progress of the Development team. The operations team develops a monitoring plan as per their understanding. | In DevOps, the Operations team is completely aware of the progress the developers are making. The operations team interacts with developers and jointly develops a monitoring plan that caters to the IT and business needs. They also use advanced Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Tools |
| Before go-live, the load testing crashes the application. The release is delayed. | Before go-live, the load testing makes the application a bit slow. The development team quickly fixes the bottlenecks. The application is released on time. |
DevOps allows Agile Development Teams to implement Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. This helps them to launch products faster into the market.
Need of DevOps: Other Important reasons
1. Predictability: DevOps offers a significantly lower failure rate of new releases
2. Reproducibility: Version everything so that earlier versions can be restored anytime.
3. Maintainability: Effortless process of recovery in the event of a new release crashing or disabling the current system.
4. Time to market: DevOps reduces the time to market up to 50% through streamlined software delivery. This is particularly the case for digital and mobile applications.
5. Greater Quality: DevOps helps the team to provide improved quality of application development as it incorporates infrastructure issues.
6. Reduced Risk: DevOps incorporates security aspects in the software delivery lifecycle. It helps in the reduction of defects across the lifecycle.
7. Resiliency: The Operational state of the software system is more stable, secure, and changes are auditable.
8. Cost Efficiency: DevOps offers cost efficiency in the software development process which is always an aspiration of IT companies’ management.
9. Breaks larger code base into small pieces: DevOps is based on the agile programming method. Therefore, it allows breaking larger codebases into smaller and manageable chunks.
When to adopt DevOps?
DevOps should be used for large distributed applications such as eCommerce sites or applications hosted on a cloud platform.
When not to adopt DevOps?
It should not be used in mission-critical applications like banks, power, and other sensitive data sites. Such applications need strict access controls on the production environment, a detailed change management policy, access control policy to the data centers.
Understanding DevOps Concept
DevOps is deep integration between development and operations. Understanding DevOps Concepts is not possible without knowing the DevOps lifecycle.
Here is brief information about the Continuous DevOps life-cycle:
1. Development
In this DevOps stage, the development of software takes place constantly. In this phase, the entire development process is separated into small development cycles. This benefits the DevOps team to speed up the software development and delivery process.
2. Testing
QA team use tools like Selenium to identify and fix bugs in the new piece of code.
3. Integration
In this stage, new functionality is integrated with the prevailing code, and testing takes place. Continuous development is only possible due to continuous integration and testing.
4. Deployment
In this phase, the deployment process takes place continuously. It is performed in such a manner that any changes made at any time in the code, should not affect the functioning of high traffic website.
5. Monitoring
In this phase, the operation team will take care of the inappropriate system behavior or bugs that are found in production.
DevOps Work Flow
Workflows provide a visual overview of the sequence in which input is provided. It also tells about actions that are performed, and output is generated for an operations process.
DevOps Principles
Here, are six principles that are essential when adopting DevOps:
1. Customer-Centric Action: DevOps team must take customer-centric action for that they should constantly invest in products and services.
2. End-To-End Responsibility: The DevOps team needs to provide performance support until they become end-of-life. This enhances the level of responsibility and the quality of the products engineered.
3. Continuous Improvement: DevOps culture focuses on continuous improvement to minimize waste. It continuously speeds up the improvement of products or services offered.
4. Automate everything: Automation is a vital principle of the DevOps process. This is not only for software development but also for the entire infrastructure landscape.
5. Work as one team: In the DevOps culture role of the designer, developer, and tester are already defined. All they needed to do is work as one team with complete collaboration.
6. Monitor and test everything: It is very important for the DevOps team to have robust monitoring and testing procedures.
Who is a DevOps Engineer?
A DevOps Engineer is an IT professional who works with software developers, system operators, and other production IT staff to administer code releases. DevOps should have hard as well as soft skills to communicate and collaborate with development, testing, and operations teams.
DevOps approach needs frequent, incremental changes to code versions, which means frequent deployment and testing regimens. Although DevOps engineers need to code occasionally from scratch, it is important that they should have the basics of software development languages.
A DevOps engineer will work with development team staff to tackle the coding and scripting needed to connect elements of code, like libraries or software development kits.
DevOps Engineer: Roles, Responsibilities, and Skills
DevOps engineers work full-time. They are responsible for the production and ongoing maintenance of a software application’s platform.
Following are some expected Roles, Responsibilities, and Skills that are expected from DevOps engineers:
- Able to perform system troubleshooting and problem-solving across platform and application domains.
- Manage project effectively through open, standards-based platforms
- Increase project visibility thought traceability
- Improve quality and reduce development cost with collaboration
- Analyse, design and evaluate automation scripts & systems
- Ensuring critical resolution of system issues by using the best cloud security solutions services
- DevOps engineer should have the soft skill of problem-solver and quick-learner
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