Coined by Patrick Debois in 2009, DevOps is a term that is formed by combining two words that are “development” and “operations”. It makes people understand that what one typically means by the term DevOps. It is not a technology, standard, or process, rather it is a culture. The term DevOps environment is also widely used which refers to an IT organization that has taken on the DevOps culture. In this article, you will understand about DevOps in brief.
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DevOps – Table of Contents
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a term that is widely used for a group of concepts that, some of which are not new, are rapidly spreading in the technical community. It is a combination of tools, practices, and philosophies that tend to increase the ability of an organization to deliver the applications and the services at a high speed. Besides, it advances and improves the products at a faster rate as compared to the organizations that are using traditional software development and processes. In conclusion, the speed and improvement that it provides help the companies to serve the needs of their customers better and compete with their rivals more effectively in the market.
Why DevOps?
DevOps comes in the picture when the organizations need to deliver new features and maintain stability as well. With its help, teams can take advantage of automatic deploys, share codebases, and benefit a lot from continuous integration. Here is why one should choose DevOps over other traditional similar software.
- Technical Benefits: Firstly, it provides a lot of technical benefits by increasing the collaboration between development and operations teams. The frequency of releasing the code into production increases by reducing the development lifecycle time. Secondly, it increases the value of IT in organizations by building a competitive advantage for businesses with the help of continuous development and deployment. Thirdly and most importantly, with the help of its agile methodology, it makes the lives of development and operations teams easy.
- Culture Benefits: The culture benefits include sharing the best practices and knowledge to build robust processes, promoting trust between the team members and risk-sharing, and introducing a durable quality by increasing performance.
- Business Benefits: It brings plenty of business benefits by helping the organization to create meaningful relationships with its customers and providing them reliable applications even faster.
Why you should use DevOps?
DevOps has a set of processes that bring the operations and development teams together for complete software development and allowing the organizations to improve and create products at a faster rate. Here are the top 5 reasons why one should adopt DevOps:
- It reduces the overall costs and IT headcount requirements.
- This software increases the speed of the development process making it less prone to errors.
- The overall software development culture improves as the teams collaborate and communicate better making them happier and more productive. Everyone trusts each other that makes them innovate and experiment more effectively.
- It releases more frequent codes due to shorter development cycles. As a result, it easily spots code defects which in turn reduces the number of deployment failures.
- Applications are ready to use more quickly because of the combination of the development and operations teams. So, the development lifecycles become shorter resulting in faster innovation.
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DevOps Features
DevOps improves the collaboration process between the development and operations teams. An engineer in DevOps will work with the IT employees to encourage coordination among testing, operation, and development functions by streamlining and automating the deployment and integration process. It has the following key features:
- Increase Ops alignment to business goals
- Provides collaboration between teams
- Improves response time and business agility
- Easily scalable
- Automation
- Increases Customer Satisfaction, business efficiency, and retention
- Provides the feature of continuous build, deployment, test, and integrate
- Reduced time for action and more frequent software releases
- Delivers new features faster and reduces IT costs
- Better release control, versioning, and development velocity
DevOps Architecture
To deliver applications, both the development and operations are necessary. The deployment of an application comprises the analysis of requirements, developing, designing, and testing the components or frameworks. The architecture of DevOps is useful for large distributed applications and the ones that are hosted on the cloud platform. The architecture and application are designed in such a way that it increases productivity and reduces the shortcomings. Given below are the components of the DevOps architecture:
- Build: This component is dependent upon the needs of the user. It is a mechanism to control the usage of capacity and resources.
- Code: This component helps in tracking changes, reverting to original code developed, and getting notified about the difference in actual and expected output. The users can reuse and arrange codes accordingly.
- Test: It automates testing. Thus, it decreases the time for testing and deploying the code to production.
- Plan: It plans development using the agile methodology. It helps in organizing work and plan accordingly to boost productivity.
- Monitor: This component identifies if there are any risks of failures. Also, it tracks the system accurately to check its health.
- Deploy: It supports automated deployment. Moreover, it enables the users to capture the insights and check the optimization scenario.
- Operate: Throughout the service lifecycle, both the teams operate collaboratively. They interact with developers and come up with the monitoring plans.
- Release: Deployment can be done by automation. Mostly, it is done by manual triggering. However, processes that are involved in release management are used to do the deployment manually so that they can lessen the impact on the customers.
DevOps Benefits
Companies and organizations all around the globe adopt DevOps because of the benefits that it provides to its customers. By using this application, companies deliver with the maximum speed, innovation, and functionality. Below are the reasons:
- Speed: It allows the businesses to innovate faster, grow more efficient at giving the best results, and adapt to the changing needs.
- Rapid Delivery: The ability to release new features and fix bugs improves so that businesses can respond to their customer needs faster. It increases the frequency and rate of delivery to improve and innovate the product faster.
- Reliability: It maintains a positive experience for the users. They can reliably deliver fast ensuring the quality of application updates and changes.
- Scale: This application lets you operate and manage the development and infrastructure processes at scale with the help of consistency and automation thus reducing risks and increasing efficiency.
- Improved Collaboration: The software increase collaboration and emphasizes ownership and accountability. In short, it reduces inefficiencies and saves a lot of time.
- Security: It helps in preserving compliance and retaining control. The fine-grained controls, configuration management techniques, and automated compliance policies increase security.
DevOps New Offerings
DevOps has made some major changes in its latest updates to increase performance, efficiency, and user satisfaction. It has improved the areas of administration, reporting and analytics service, pipelines, repos, developer resources, user guides, and archived content. In its recent release, it has included:
- Billing Management
- Delivery Plans 2.0
- Customize Work item state even after the PR is closed
- Remove the rule that assigns the bug to the person who created it
- Improvements in YAML editor
- Conversion from classic to YAML build pipelines
- Preview attachments
It has already planned about what fixes will be made and features will be introduced in future upgrades. Also, it continuously improves its working which is the biggest reason for its success in the business market.
Advantages and Disadvantages of DevOps
Not every product is perfect. Similarly, DevOps for developing business applications has some advantages and disadvantages that are needed to be considered.
Advantages –
- Firstly, with the help of DevOps, it is easier for the users to collaborate and use all the tools in it that can be used by them anywhere.
- It allows for faster testing and deployment. Generally, it increases release frequency and gives developers more computing power.
- It offers better documentation and quality control to users.
- This application hides the data and information flow complexities because of which employees can focus on the tools without the need to understand the entire toolchain.
- The in-house IT department benefits from it as it helps them learn new tools and systems.
- Lastly, with DevOps, it is easier to offload several aspects of a project for a faster turnaround and better collaboration.
Disadvantages –
- Firstly, most of the time, the application chooses speed over security. It can create unnecessary risks and exposures.
- Cloning the enterprise infrastructure is a complex process for test purposes. If users do that, it can lead to compatibility problems.
- In order to succeed, a company needs experts to understand integration, workflow, tools, and infrastructure. A person with less experience can face a lot of problems.