DevOps (Development & Operations) is a culture that fosters collaboration among all roles involved in the development and maintenance of software.
Many companies apply DevOps philosophies and processes to remove assumptions about customers. Assumptions are not reality. A bottom-up user approach ensures an understanding of how people will use your technology to improve their lives. You then have to make sure you know how managers manage within your organization and how executives can leverage your capabilities to drive their strategies.
You don’t want to assume you know the correct solution for a customer’s problem. DevOps eliminates assumptions and creates a safer environment with a combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that work together to deliver better, assumption-free solutions. Take a look at these 5 considerations to better understand how that works.
CONSIDERATION 1: Why DevOps?
The word “DevOps” is an amalgamation of the words “development” and “operations.” DevOps helps increase the speed of delivering applications and services. It allows organizations to serve customers efficiently and compete more in the market. In simple terms, DevOps aligns with development and IT operations with better communication and collaboration.
DevOps represents the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products faster than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. It provides communication, integration, automation, and close cooperation among all the people needed to plan, develop, test, deploy, release, and maintain a Solution. DevOps is part of the Agile Product Delivery competency of the Lean Enterprise.
DevOps teams provide a critical business process in most IT organizations because of the strong collaboration between the DevOps-related teams and the alignment between the development, testing, and production environments – and flexible – thanks to the adoption of DevOps practices such as continuous improvement/continuous development (CI/CD), infrastructure as code (IaC), testing automation, comprehensive application monitoring, and others.
You may hear the phrase “DevSecOps.” This terminology focuses more on security disciplines required to help our client’s IT infrastructure be more reliable.
CONSIDERATION 2: Development and Operations Challenges
Developers are typically enthusiastic and willing to adopt new approaches and technologies to solve organizations’ problems. However, they do face challenges, such as:
- The competitive marketplace creates a lot of pressure for on-time delivery.
- They must cater to production-ready code management and new capability implementation.
- The release cycle is long, so the development team has to make several assumptions before application deployment. In such a scenario, resolving issues during deployment in the production or staging environment takes more time.
Operators are historically focused on the stability and reliability of IT services. The operations team is, therefore, concerned about making changes to resources, technologies, or approaches as they look for peace. Their challenges include:
- Managing resource contention as demands for resources increase
- Handling redesigns or tweaks required for application execution in a production environment
- Diagnosing and resolving production-related issues after application deployment in isolation
CONSIDERATION 3: Factors Impacting DevOps on Clients
1. How do they organize DevOps initiatives
A company’s CIO organizes a DevOps initiative as a part of the IT department program. Thus, the IT department gets an opportunity to make minor painful changes in the development and operations activities of the entire company. CIO, in his turn, can arrange financial investments and human resources most optimally. A program manager becomes responsible for designing the DevOps strategy and monitoring its implementation.
2. How did they build the DevOps strategy
To draw up an effective DevOps strategy, a program manager should utilize best practices that will improve interdepartmental collaboration and enable modern ways of infrastructure provisioning, software development, and testing. Among the most important methods are the following:
Put the company’s development, testing, design, operations, and other teams in a shared working DevOps environment, making all the members focus on the outcomes of the software development cycle and understand each other’s motives and duties. Set the common goal – to accelerate a software development cycle and ensure the high quality of the software – for everyone involved in software development and operations.
Implement IaC to ensure the prompt provision of the IT infrastructure upon developers’ or test engineers’ requests whenever they need it to create a new build or check its quality. This will allow DevOps practitioners to get new infrastructure for development or testing in one click and avoid human errors that often result from the manual configuration of IT infrastructures.
Automate software building, unit testing, application testing via UI, software integrating, deploying, and releasing processes to speed up the software development-testing-releasing cycle.
3. How they containerize
Containerization implemented with such tools as Docker solves the problem with the reliability of software, for example, when it travels from the development to the testing environment and then to production. Containers include everything required to run an application, i.e., all the dependencies, libraries, and configuration files. In addition, the isolation of the containerized parts of the software from the overall IT infrastructure allows for their stable running regardless of the differences in the environments they are put in.
Moreover, since the application pieces (its database, front end, etc.) are put into several containers, it is easier for an operations team to manage the application since they do not need to rebuild the entire software when the changes are required in one of its microservices.
4. How they integrate infrastructure automation with CI/CD tools
The containerized application must be appropriately managed when software is put into containers. Infrastructure automation tools like Kubernetes, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet are integrated with CI/CD tools like Jenkins, Bamboo, or GoCD for more efficient configuration management and software deployment.
For example, Kubernetes – for large infrastructures – or Ansible – for smaller ones – allows managing containers for fault tolerance, monitoring their health, and rolling software updates. Jenkins creates, tests, and deploys new builds into Kubernetes.
5. How they utilize test automation and align QA with development
To achieve faster delivery with DevOps, sufficient automated testing must be ensured. However, not each testing type must be automated. For instance, exploratory, usability, and security testing should still be performed manually. Functional testing may partially remain manual, depending on the efforts needed to write automated tests.
The development and testing activities are carried out in tandem to avoid post-release bugs. While the application is still developing, the best practice is to conduct automated tests 1-2 times a day. Developers work on stabilizing software before releasing the next build if defects are found.
6. How do they ensure total application performance monitoring
Application performance monitoring provides the DevOps-related team transparency over all the performance issues, e.g., slow response, memory leaks, and runtime errors. The problems may be revealed during application server monitoring, user experience monitoring, etc.
Application performance monitoring allows detecting, prioritizing, and isolating application defects before end users find them, as well as finding the root causes of the errors quickly with the use of special application monitoring software, such as Zabbix, Nagios, or Prometheus, customized for monitoring a particular application.
DevOps (Development & Operations) is a culture that fosters collaboration among all roles involved in the development and maintenance of software.
CONSIDERATION 4: Why Companies Follow a DevOps Approach
1. DevOps- An Infinity Cycle
- A DevOps approach enables development and operations teams to work together to deliver applications and services at high speed and accuracy. However, DevOps is not a technology but a philosophy guiding every aspect of our culture, processes, and tooling.
- Furthermore, DevOps brings alive the possibility of the development and operation team to work together and develop better software by automating workflows, testing, and by continuously measuring performance.
- It is proven that companies using DevOps reported more considerable experience improvement in the quality of their software deployments; many have released new software more frequently and wrote a higher rate of code production.
2. Why is DevOps important?
- DevOps, our teams stay future-minded by helping IT operations meet the customer’s expectations head-on. For example, Scott Blandford, Chief Digital Officer at TIAA, in an interview with TechBecon, told how his company has seen its $40 billion business make significant improvements using DevOps principles and yielded a four-fold increase in productivity.
3. Breaking Down the Silos:
- The first and foremost benefit of integrating DevOps is the increasing internal unity of our teams to focus on the customer’s use cases. The DevOps approach encourages the development, operational, and security teams to collaborate to work together day in and day out. In addition, it helps our teams focus more on transparency, communication, and integration.
4. There is Always a Need For Speed:
- A company’s character is how fast it can deliver a solution. With DevOps fused in, your company’s workflow moves at warp speed to fulfill customers’ requests more quickly and reduce the time-to-market. Finally, there is a continuous loop of product/service delivery with full ownership.
5. More Reliability Through Automation:
- DevOps is all about encompassing differences and working for the betterment of the community. DevOps creates a flexible environment and automates continuous integration and delivery processes, making the teams work faster and better to deliver reliable content to the users.
6. Fully Secured:
- DevOps implementation is fully secured, and we don’t need to sacrifice security but can gain more compliance. In addition, we can get related management policies in place using automated tools and approaches.
7. On-time Delivery:
- DevOps can make team collaboration more successful with more automation tools that can create rapid deliveries, satisfy customers, and increase the ROI of our development efforts.
CONSIDERATION 5: Why Companies Follow a DevOps Approach
1. DevOps- An Infinity Cycle
- a DevOps approach enables development and operations teams to work together to deliver applications and services at high speed and accuracy. However, DevOps is not a technology but a philosophy guiding every aspect of a company’s culture, processes, and tooling.
- Furthermore, DevOps brings alive the possibility of the development and operation team to work together and develop better software by automating workflows, testing, and by continuously measuring performance.
- It is proven that companies using DevOps reported more considerable experience improvement in the quality of their software deployments; many have released new software more frequently and reported a higher rate of code production.
2. Why is DevOps important?
- DevOps teams stay future-minded by helping IT operations meet the customer’s expectations head-on. For example, Scott Blandford, Chief Digital Officer at TIAA, in an interview with TechBecon, told how his company has seen its $40 billion business make significant improvements using DevOps principles and yielded a four-fold increase in productivity.
3. Breaking Down the Silos:
- The first and foremost benefit of integrating DevOps is the increasing internal unity of teams to focus on the customer’s use cases. The DevOps approach encourages the development, operational, and security teams to collaborate to work together day in and day out. In addition, it helps focus more on transparency, communication, and integration.
4. There is Always a Need For Speed:
- A company’s character is how fast it can deliver a solution. With DevOps fused in, the workflow of your IT organization moves at warp speed to fulfill customers’ requests more quickly. In addition, the time-to-market is reduced significantly. Finally, there is a continuous loop of product/service delivery with full ownership.
5. More Reliability Through Automation:
- DevOps is all about encompassing differences and working for the betterment of the community. DevOps creates a flexible environment and automates continuous integration and delivery processes, making the teams work faster and better to deliver reliable content to the users.
6. Fully Secured:
- DevOps implementation is fully secured, and we don’t need to sacrifice security but can gain more compliance. In addition, we can get related management policies in place using automated tools and approaches.
7. On-time Delivery:
- DevOps can make team collaboration more successful with more automation tools that can create rapid deliveries, satisfy customers, and increase the ROI of development efforts.