DevOps: All You Need to Know

In this competitive business atmosphere, IT organizations constantly strive to stay ahead of the competitors and meet the growing customer demands. With cutting-edge technologies available today, modern organizations follow several methodologies to render reliable software products swiftly to the market.

One such methodology that IT organizations leverage predominantly is DevOps. Yes, many companies implement DevOps for their project development today. No wonder, by seeing the benefits enjoyed by those companies, many other organizations are joining the DevOps bandwagon.

So, what exactly is DevOps? Is it similar to the Agile methodology? What are its key principles? And, finally, how can it benefit your business and customers? Those are too many questions. But, you will find answers to every question in detail in this blog.

Hang on. We will take you on a detailed tour of DevOps. Here is DevOps: All you need to know.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a combination of two terms- development and operations. Ideally, DevOps is an approach to optimize Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) by bringing development and operations closer. It’s a new ideology that helped IT organizations to speed up project life cycles and increase ROIs.

Traditionally, the development and operations teams were isolated. It often created problems like taking a long time to release software, miscommunication, and other delays. DevOps removes the barriers between the development and operations team by encouraging these teams to work together across the entire software development life cycle, from design, development, test, deployment to operations.

DevOps approach facilitates the developer and operations team to communicate and collaborate on the projects. Thus, you can enjoy

• Improved Speed: DevOps enables you to speed up the development process, innovate faster, adapt to the changes better, and become more efficient in driving business results.
• Swift Delivery: DevOps encourages an increased pace of releases, enabling you to launch products faster. That, in turn, gives you a competitive edge.
• Trustability: DevOps applies continuous integration and constant delivery, ensuring the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes. Thus, you can deliver reliable products swiftly while rendering an optimum user experience.
• Improved Collaboration: With a DevOps model, developers and operations teams collaborate closely, share responsibilities, and combine their workflows. That reduces any communication gaps, inefficiencies, and time-lapses.
• Enhanced Security: Businesses can adopt a DevOps model without compromising security by leveraging automated, integrated security testing tools.

However, understanding and following the DevOps process is mandatory to see the optimal results.

Understanding the DevOps Process:

DevOps basically works by following the below principles:

• Automation
• Iteration
• Active Participation
• Constant improvement
• Continuous testing
• Collaboration

Here are a few steps to follow to apply those DevOps principles for each new deployment.

1. Plan: Teams have to schedule tasks and deadlines for the new software development project.
2. Code: Firstly, the development team needs to work on code development and code review. Then, they have to collaborate with the operations team about the project, its functions, and features.
3. Build: Build the source code into a format and deploy it in a specific place of the infrastructure. It is the first step towards continuous integration (CI).
4. Testing: Teams have to test continuously for improvement.
5. Release: You can deploy the code according to continuous integration tools.
6. Deploy: Automation Process with continuous deployment.
7. Operate: Build or maintain a scalable infrastructure, infrastructure as code, security issues, and log management.
8. Monitor: Monitoring tools help you identify things faster and fix them quickly.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment- The key processes in DevOps:

Continuous integration is the primary part of the DevOps process. It enables the teams to launch new features faster while reducing risks drastically. Continuous integration is nothing but a set of practices that automatically test each code change before it is released for production.

To be precise, the developer tests the code instantly before revising it. Thus, any error can be detected and rectified automatically before moving into production. The automatic production release stage is often known as continuous deployment.

What is DevOps Methodology? How to adapt it to an Agile Methodology?

As most of us know, Agile methodology is rapidly growing in organizations. But, how far is the Agile methodology compatible with DevOps? Let’s analyze.

The motive of the Agile methodology is to shorten the duration of development cycles. Thus, it reduces the frequency between various product releases and speeds up the delivery process. In fact, both the Agile and DevOps methodologies have a similar goal. However, they differ in a few aspects.

The Agile methodology is Agile and flexible. It encourages teams to set development priorities based on the varying circumstances and unexpected changes. But, in the DevOps methodology, it is quite challenging to implement sudden changes in the ongoing tasks.

Now, how to adapt the Agile methodology to DevOps? All you have to do is to take the following details related to the development and ops businesses into account. It involves three actions:

• Create requests in the form of tickets: That will help you understand the work targets effectively. Always have some buffer time for some unexpected workloads or new changes.
• Promote Active Communication: Yes, teams must actively participate in each other’s events. Thus, they can set up a continuous improvement process. Plus, it will help everyone share their views and focus on the project’s progress.

Educate both the Development and Operations Teams:

Both teams must know the influence and impact of each team’s work on the business and end-users. For instance, if an e-commerce site is down on a weekend evening and no longer responds, the business may suffer a heavy loss in sales. By collaborating and working together, both developers and the operational teams can better support each other.

Of course, communication is the primary thing to align your developers and Operations teams. However, you will also need DevOps tools to set everything up.

DevOps Tools:

DevOps is all about collaboration and process automation between development and operations teams. So, to collaborate and automate effectively, you will need tools for your help. Here are a few DevOps tools that will help you readily:

Source Code Management Tools:

Source code management tools are mandatory and a part of the development teams. It is crucial to share these tools with the operational teams for better communication. That way, they can understand the various modifications of the code and the authors of those modifications. Git and Github enable you to create a history for source code files.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment Tools:

Continuous integration and continuous deployment tools are the next inevitable tools for DevOps. These tools automate testing of source code revisions and instantly launch the deployment of test environments and production environments. GitlabCI, Jenkins, Google, AWS are some common CI/CD tools in use.

Leverage Containers:

Using containers is recommended to avoid unexpected issues during the deployment in production. You can isolate an application with all the elements that are needed to work. The two popular tools are Docker and RKT. Leverage container orchestrators like Kubernetes to simplify the deployment and management of containers.

Monitor Kubernetes Clusters:

Tools like Prometheus and Grafana are ideal for monitoring Kubernetes clusters. The ELK suite ( Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) is popular for log and aggregation analysis.

Project Management Tool:

Seamless communication is crucial in DevOps. Thus, you will need a project management tool like the agile one, Jira, or the generalist one, Trello.

In general, there is no one right tool in DevOps. It will vary depending on your project needs. Moreover, all the tools said above are quickly available and can be integrated into the cloud for testing and production purposes.

DevOps and the Cloud:

Cloud made the software and services available on the internet rather than locally stored on the computer. Yes, Cloud providers are remote hosting solutions, enabling the data and tools to be stored in data centers outside the organization.

Of course, Cloud and DevOps are independent yet complementary strategies. Companies should review their work to stay ahead in the market. Plus, production cycles need to be reduced to keep the end-users happy. The cloud addresses such needs for agility.

When you combine cloud with DevOps, you can overcome load balancing, redundancy issues, and more. The most popular Cloud service providers include Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure, and AWS. These cloud service providers have all the DevOps tools mentioned above.

In a Nutshell:

The DevOps implementation often varies across organizations based on their requirements, goals, and processes. It focuses on streamlining and speeding up the software development life cycle. It adds predictability, scalability, and flexibility to the entire process of software development, testing, deployment, management, and maintenance.

Above all, DevOps supports the Agile development methodology and shares many of its values like continuous improvement, faster delivery, smooth communication, and more. In short, DevOps and Agile complement each other perfectly.

Nevertheless, with DevOps, IT firms can enjoy innovative products, reduced market times, efficient development, higher reliability, and improved customer satisfaction. Leverage this efficient and friendly methodology DevOps to enjoy all these benefits and more.