DevOps And Continuous Integration

In this article, you will learn the key concepts of DevOps.

• What is DevOps?
• Job Role of a DevOps Engineer
• Employer or Team Member Expectations
• We will understand about DevOps as a practice

But before we go into detail about DevOps, let us understand the problem of companies and teams which led to the evolution of DevOps. Now let’s understand the software development scenario.

Around 10 years back, this used to happen by implementing Software Development Lifecycle model called SDLC Waterfall model. SDLC Waterfall Model was effective and was used for a decade but it’s not relevant it today’s world as we have evolved from SDLC Waterfall Model from Agile Development.

SDLC

SDLC was used for a decade but now it’s not relevant as it’s highly inflexible, unpredictable qualities.

Agile development

Agile Development model is extremely flexible, efficient and achieves more goals than SDLC and it is more efficient and productive.

Agile & DevOps

• Now the Dev teams work in agile. As with agile, they want to have tools at their disposal which allows them to perform deployment and development at the same place
• In agile you divide your development into multiples’ sprints.
• You need to be able to make release at every sprints
• Sprints are very quick in agile so you need to be able to be ready with products at the end of every sprint cycle.
• Whatever the sprint cycle is to achieve this, we try to provide an infrastructure where the developers can create a product and seamlessly during product release and the end of the each sprint you should be in collaboration with the development team and operations team to obtain the necessary infrastructure.

Now let us understand what a development team is.

Development Team

The development team consist of the people who worked towards the product and are responsible for these tasks:

• Designing
• Development
• Verification
• Delivery of the product.

Operations Team

An operation team makes sure the infrastructure used by the development team is stable and it is in place so the serves, build machines and tools are all available for DevOps to do the following tasks:

• To works efficiently.
• To work in a better way.
• To releases quickly.
• To identify problems quickly.
• To ensure high quality delivery.

So we have these two individual streams or individual groups of team to working together.



But the problem with these two independent teams is that there is not enough synergy between them.



Sometimes the development team might want to make changes on their servers so their products can be deployed or the server or make changes in their tool chain so there can be developed and deployed in a different way,



But operational team might not want to make changes in the infrastructure as they may not be sure about the infrastructures stability or might not know if the changes that the development team is requesting will impact the product in an burst way or might be the cost of the infrastructure.

There needs to be a way to bring the collaboration/synergy between these two teams to solve the discussed problem called DevOps.

                                                   

DevOps

• DevOps helps in various frontiers of the product delivery.
• A DevOps person works from both the development as well as operations Team.
• DevOps person helps development team to deliver quality products by helping them in performing various operations.

To accomplish the product quality perform the following DevOps Operations which are as follows,

• Build Continuously.
• Verify Continuously.
• Release / Deploy Continuously.
• Monitor application/ Product Continuously

In addition as the DevOps Operational profession you need to do the following tasks,

• Manage the infrastructure at a very high level but not to the level of operational team
• Provide some sort of automations and virtualizations.
• Dev Ops teams brings the best out of development and operations team tries to solve the problem we discussed.

Tools for DevOps

Now we are looking to the tools which help us to manage these tasks.



Continuous Integration

Build successfully, verify continuously and release/deploy continuously these three terms are known with a single term like continuous integration.

Continuous integrations helps us to restrict the product destruction on the time of delivery. Under continuous Integrations, we do the following tasks,

• Maintain Single Source Repository.
• Automate the Build Make every build self-testing.
• Every Commit should be on integration machine.
• Keep the build fast.
• Test in a clone of Production.
• Make it easy for anyone to get the latest executable.
• Everyone can see what’s happening.
• Automate Deployment.

The primary goal of a Continuous integration is to remember the team is to integrate the work frequently as soon as possible usually at least once in a day.

By implementing this, you developed the software quickly and the confidence is higher for each build and you deliver software more efficiently.

I hope this article helps you in understanding DevOps and Continous Integeration.