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Background
Software development includes several processes like defining scopes, requirement specifications, and use cases, designing solution architects, converting use cases to tasks, writing code, testing and validations, managing releases, and deployments, and then maintenance. These tasks are repetitive and can be a highly manual process that can significantly be prone to errors. The software development process comprises different teams from operations, development as well as business. Day by day, these processes are becoming more complex which shows the need for proper tools and practices to handle them. Additionally, technology has drastically changed and evolved in the last decade which again adds complexity to the development process. Because development, implementation, and operational teams having different skill sets are involved together in the software development process, they can be out of sync, and can lack proper visibility which can delay the overall delivery and result in disappointing the business stakeholders.
To overcome complex situations and manage efficiently, we have DevOps.
In this article, I will cover the following points.
- What is DevOps?
- Background, why DevOps is required
- DevOps culture and How DevOps comes
- Development and Operation responsibilities
- DevOps Principles and Practices
What is DevOps?
We appreciate Patrick Debois, father of DevOps, for outlining the importance of sharing within the DevOps culture. The term was formed by joining Development and Operations.
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DevOps is not a technology or a standard, it is commonly referred to as culture, DevOps culture.
DevOps is a software development culture or practice that creates collaboration among development and operations to speed up quality software delivery inefficiently way.
According to Gartner
DevOps represents a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of agile, lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach. DevOps emphasizes people (and culture), and it seeks to improve collaboration between operations and development teams. DevOps implementations utilize technology, especially automation tools that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic infrastructure from a life cycle perspective.
DevOps unifies the members of Development and Operation into one culture and enables proper sync up among them. DevOps includes core development, IT Operations, quality engineering, and security to work together to produce reliable and better products faster. What is more, adopting this culture helps the organization to respond better to customers, provides current and correct visibility, builds confidence to product delivery, and knows the future implications.
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High-level Development Responsibilities
- Functional Requirements
- Planning Development Task (use cases, user stories, and Task)
- Writing Code
- Build Pipeline
- Test Plan and QA
- Code Quality and Management
High-Level Operation Responsibilities
- Non-Functional Requirements
- Software Infrastructure (Server or web apps) Readiness
- Deployment Task Planning
- Deployment
- Operations
- Monitor
- Release Pipeline
DevOps Principles and Practices
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DevOps is all about cultural adoption and mindset change in an organization. DevOps teams establish some practices throughout the application lifecycle; however, we cannot limit the culture only to these principles. Most known principles and practices are under this philosophy,
Collaboration
The main aim of DevOps is to bridge the gap across function teams. Create a collaborative environment between development, IT operations, and quality assurance. This is a cultural shift to build a unilateral team that has common objectives related to fast and quality deliveries. Additionally, DevOps creates proper sync-up, accountability, and ownership toward a common goal among the team.
Automation
Automate the workflows and whatever is possible. DevOps encourages the automation of some manual and time-consuming processes related to testing, building, releasing, deployments, etc. This principle suggests automating the build process, testing, releasing, and deployment. Automation enables the team to focus on core activities instead of doing manual jobs and quick responses to customer feedback. This is a primary action toward continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) or the ability to deliver new versions/releases to clients in less time.
Incremental Release
It is also called Iteration where DevOps encourages to delivery of a project into small chunks throughout the project timeline. It is also encouraged to divide a project into small, testable, and deliverable chunks so that it can follow the complete process like code merge, test, release, and deploy before production. This incremental release will reduce the errors, bugs, and problematic causes before going to the final release or production. Additionally, this will create sync-up and a proper understanding of the solution. This Iterative method makes the development process more flexible and error-free.
Continuous Improvement
Adapting to change is another concept for DevOps. We should be flexible to adopt changes in any aspect if those are related to improvement, optimization, cost-effectiveness, technological advancement, and likewise. DevOps culture motivates us to learn from failure and be flexible to act based on circumstances. Change can be on software, customer needs, technology advancement, change to the process, methodology, and so on for improvement and those should be welcomed as continuous improvement.
Continuous Monitoring
DevOps teams need to keep track of delivered software and make sure to perform without any issues. Continuous monitoring includes system tracking, monitoring logs, performance, application environments, defects, and so on.
Some DevOps practices which are based on the above principles are given below.
- Agile Approach in Software Development
- Continuous Integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD)
- Managing code through Version control
- Infrastructure as Code: flexible to deployment environments where we can create servers or applications for testing that are identical to production and destroy easily.
- Configuration Management
Conclusion
In this article, I have discussed how the DevOps concept evolved and why it is essential. DevOps is neither a technology nor a standard but a culture and practice to unite the development, testing, and operations for effective, quality, smooth, and speed up the overall software delivery time. I have also elaborated on its principles and practices; however, those are not limited only to above mentioned. The core principles enable collaboration and integration among the development and IT operations, bringing automation wherever possible with incremental delivery. It also suggests being flexible to adopt changes for continuous improvement and monitoring. Its primary aim is to sync development and operation for smooth and faster delivery.