DevOps refers to an umbrella term covering processes and cultures which extend beyond DevOps software development to include all stakeholders of its software development cycle - including line of business stakeholders, customers and end-users.
DevOps has revolutionized software delivery over the past 20+ years. From massive applications-wide releases every few months or years to smaller iterative features or functional updates that are released every day or multiple times each day - DevOps represents todays standard method for software release.
DevOps is all about meeting the ever-increasing demands of software users for new, innovative features that provide uninterrupted performance and availability.
Devops: How Did We Get Here?
Up until just before 2000, most software was produced using the waterfall approach: an iterative method for large software projects that involved creating large amounts of quality code that changed everything throughout an app and required multiple phases for integration.
Software teams spent months writing this new code that dramatically affected entire applications before finally adding in these changes - a development process which took multiple months per phase before seeing the final product.
Before, teams responsible for quality assurance (QA), operations and security would retest the code again, this took months or years between software releases with significant bug fixes or patches occurring between releases.
Furthermore, this "big bang approach" to feature delivery was often complicated with complex implementation plans, tight schedule interlocks between upstream and downstream systems as well as ITs hopes that business requirements had not changed substantially before "go live".
Agile software development methods, which use iterative and not linear development approaches to focus on more frequent updates of application code, have become popular with development teams looking for faster development while improving quality.
One such agile method used by development teams is continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD). Within CI/CD, smaller pieces of code are integrated once or twice weekly into the code base before being integrated, tested, and prepared for deployment to production - an approach known as agile transformed from one large "bang approach" into many smaller "snap approaches," which compartmentalized risk more efficiently than its predecessor, the "big bang approach".
Agile development practices accelerate software development and delivery; however they also expose currently siloed IT functions such as system provisioning, configuration management and acceptance testing as still-isolated entities.
DevOps emerged from agile methodologies. It introduced tools and processes which extended continuous iteration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) automation throughout the software development lifecycle and implemented close cooperation between development and operations at each step.
The Devops Lifecycle: How Devops Works
DevOps refers to an automated, iterative set of processes or workflows executed as part of an overall automated, iterative software development lifecycle with the objective to maximize rapid software delivery with superior quality and minimize delivery times and costs.
According to one account, DevOps typically includes six workflows which serve this goal:
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Planning (or Ideation)- This workflow involves teams identifying new features and functionalities for their next release by studying end user feedback, case studies and input from internal stakeholders.
Their business goal in the planning phase is to maximize business value by compiling an exhaustive backlog containing those features which will produce desired outcomes.
- Development- Programmers then begin building, testing, and coding new features based on user stories or items in their backlog. Programming methods commonly utilized during this phase include test-driven development (TDD), peer code review and pair programming - as well as writers coding directly at their workstation as part of an "inner loop" process before sending their code through a continuous delivery pipeline.
- Integration- (or continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)). As mentioned previously, in this workflow the new code must first be integrated with the existing base of code before being tested, packaged as executable and deployed to users. Automation activities that may be performed include merging changes into master copies; checking code out from source code repositories; compiling, unit testing and packaging executable executable files into executable forms automatically - output from this phase should then be stored into binary repositories in preparation for subsequent phases.
- Deployment is also known as continuous deployment. Runtime build output is then deployed into a runtime system - typically development system - where runtime testing for security, compliance and quality are conducted in order to intercept errors or defects before end users become aware. Each DevOps environment imposes increasingly stringent quality gates; for optimal results its recommended starting small before gradually expanding towards all user base once stability has been attained.
- Operations- Once features are live in production, "Day 2" involves operations. Monitoring performance, behavior and availability ensures they can provide value to end users. Operations ensure all features run without service disruption by monitoring network connectivity, storage platforms, compute resources and security posture. They also make sure if anything goes amiss its identified quickly so appropriate personnel are alerted immediately & problems solved promptly.
- Continuous feedback (also referred to as learning) refers to the practice of gathering and analyzing user feedback in an ongoing cycle, typically by surveying customers or end users on features, functionality and performance, then including it into planning of future releases. Furthermore, continuous improvement (wraparound or continuous enhancement) should also take place here as this step represents continuous development over time.
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Between these two workflows, there are three other important continuous workflows.
Continuous Testing: DevOps cycles typically feature a discrete test phase between integration and release.
As DevOps becomes ever more sophisticated, testing elements may now be employed across several areas such as planning (behavior driven development), development, integration (static code scanning, CVE scans and linting), configuration deployment, smoke penetration compliance testing, learning A/B tests operations. Testing serves an invaluable purpose: It exposes risks while providing IT the chance to mitigate or eliminate them.
Security: DevOps goes further than traditional waterfall and agile methodologies by integrating security from its inception (Planning), when fixing security issues is easiest and cheapest, all the way through development cycle; shifting left is used as a term to describe this approach to security which, unfortunately, was less successful with certain organizations; hence the rise of DevSecOps methodologies.
Compliance: Early and throughout development its best to address regulatory compliance (governance) and risk.
Regulated industries must often meet a certain standard of traceability, observability and accessibility in features delivered and managed in operational runtime environments; planning, developing and testing policies through continuous delivery pipelines as well as runtime environments is needed for optimal success in meeting this mandate. In order to demonstrate compliance to third party auditors its also key that compliance measures be auditable if at any point third-party auditing occurs.
DevOps Culture
DevOps has long been recognized as an approach that cannot work without culture; that can be defined as both an organizational and technical approach to software development.
DevOps at an organizational level necessitates communication, collaboration and shared responsibility amongst all the players in software delivery - not only software developers teams, but IT operations teams; security compliance governance teams as well as line of business teams - in order to innovate quickly and continuously while building quality into their software right from day one.
Most effectively, silos must be broken down and organized into autonomous, cross-functional DevOps Teams that can work from planning through feedback on code projects without waiting for approvals or handoffs from other teams.
When used within agile processes, shared accountability and collaborative efforts become key ingredients of an approach which yields tangible products and provides real value to business operations.
DevOps at its technical core requires investing in automation to keep projects moving through workflows smoothly, as well as feedback and measurement to facilitate continuous acceleration cycles and enhance software quality and performance of software products.
DevOps Tools: Building a DevOps Toolchain
DevOps demands and cultures place great value in development tools that facilitate asynchronous collaboration, seamlessly integrate DevOps workflows and automate as much of the DevOps cycle as possible.
DevOps tool categories may include:
- Project management tools allow teams to compile user stories into user stories for requirements that form their devops project, then break these requirements down into more manageable tasks that they can complete as part of an agile development workflow. DevOps developers use agile project management techniques such as Scrum, Lean and Kanban; open source alternatives include Jira or GitHub Issues for this process.
- Collaborative Source Code Repositories -Version-controlled coding environments that permit multiple creative developers to collaborate on the same codebase at once are known as version controlled coding environments or code repositories, with these integratible with Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery tools (CI/CD), security testing tools and testing applications so when new code is added it automatically advances to its next stage - GiHub or GitLab are among many open source code repositories which offer this function.
- Code checking, building, testing and deployment tasks can all be automated through continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Jenkins is one of the more popular open-source options; other once free alternatives like CircleCI are now only available as paid services like Spinnaker which span both application code layers. ArgoCD offers native continuous deployment (CI/CD).
- These frameworks contain software tools, libraries and best practices for automating performance testing: usability testing; usability, penetration and security tests as well as unit, contract and functional tests. Some of the top automation tools are multilingual while others utilize artificial intelligence for reconfiguring test configurations based on code changes - but there are plenty of test frameworks and tools out there! Selenium (formerly Thucydides), Appium Robot Framework Serenity are among many open-source test automation frameworks.
- Configuration management tools (infrastructure-as-code) -Ansible, Chef, Puppet and Terraform are open source tools used by DevOps engineers to configure and provision fully documented infrastructure through scripted execution of scripts. Kubernetes provides similar containerized application devops platform functionality.
- Monitoring tools assist DevOps teams with quickly recognizing and fixing systemic issues, collecting and analyzing live data to show how changes to code affect application performance in real-time. Popular open-source monitoring software includes Datadog, Nagios Prometheus and Splunk as potential monitoring options.
- Continuous feedback tools are tools that collect feedback from users through heat mapping, surveys or self-service issue tickets.
Read More: Benefits & Challenges Of DevOps Mobile App Development
How To Adopt A Devops Model
Devops Cultural Philosophy
DevOps is an initiative and mindset shift. At its core, DevOps involves dissolving traditional divisions between development and operations teams; engineers may take on both roles.
DevOps is an approach where two teams collaborate together to maximize both productivity and reliability of operations, communicating frequently to improve efficiencies as well as enhance quality of services provided. By understanding their customers needs and what can be done to meet them, teams take ownership over their Devops services.
When working closely with quality assurance and security teams, teams take on more of an ownership position when managing DevOps organizations, despite organizational structure differences. DevOps organizations typically include teams responsible for overseeing every stage of infrastructure creation as part of their responsibilities.
Devops Practices Explained
There are certain practices that can assist an organization with innovation faster by automating and streamlining software development and infrastructure processes, with much of this work accomplished using appropriate tooling.
One fundamental practice for fast and improved innovation lies in making frequent, small updates - this enables organizations to innovate faster for customers while lessening risk with each deployment.
DevOps models typically deploy updates more frequently than traditional software development methods, although the size and cadence of updates may change accordingly.
Microservice architectures allow organizations to increase application flexibility and innovate faster by breaking large complex systems down into more independent projects - more precisely microservices architecture enables this.
Applications are broken into numerous component parts (services), each serving its own specific function within an application; when managed independently from each other and coordinated as one whole application this reduces coordination overhead when updating applications; by pairing each service up with agile teams dedicated to each service, companies can move faster than before.
Microservices coupled with frequent releases can create significant increases in deployments that pose operational difficulties.
DevOps techniques like continuous integration and delivery offer organizations solutions, allowing for timely deliveries without issues or unreliability. Infrastructure automation techniques like infrastructure-as-code management keep computing resources flexible enough to easily adapt to frequent change while monitoring/logging allows devops engineers to track performance quickly should any problems arise.
Devops Is A Practice That Can Be Implemented
DevOps can be implemented by adopting its practices (listed below) throughout an applications lifecycle, from conception through development and release.
Some practices accelerate, automate or improve specific stages; other practices span across phases to help teams establish seamless processes which enhance productivity.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
Continuous Integration (CI), is an approach used by development teams to automate, merge and test code on an ongoing basis.
Continuous Integration enables early bug identification that makes repairs cheaper - automated tests may even be conducted as part of this practice in order to guarantee quality; additionally, artifacts created through Continuous Integration can feed release processes, encouraging frequent deployments.
Continuous Delivery (CD), also referred to as continuous deployment, is an approach for building, testing and deploying code across different collaborative environments - from test to production - with continuous releases occurring automatically in multiple environments to enhance quality.
CD systems produce deployable artifacts including infrastructure and applications which will later be consumed by automated release systems in order to release new systems or fix existing ones; monitoring alerting systems run continuously providing visibility into this CD process.
Version Control
Version control, also referred to as "version management, involves organizing code by versions and track-revising history in order to easily review or recover code.
Versioning systems such as Git, which provide multi-developer collaboration on code creation, typically implement this practice and offer easy ways of merging identical file changes together, handling conflicts efficiently and rolling back changes.
Version control is an indispensable DevOps tool that assists development teams with collaboration, the distribution of tasks among team members and easy retrieval of code in one central repository.
Versioning management also serves as the cornerstone of continuous integration and infrastructure as code practices.
Agile Software Development
Agile development of software involves teamwork, customer feedback and rapid release cycles that encourage adaptability.
Agile teams provide continuous improvements and changes for their customers while collecting feedback to meet individual customer requirements and wants. Agile differs from more traditional frameworks like waterfall which involve long release cycles with sequential phases; both Kanban and Scrum frameworks of Agile are built around Kanban principles for maximum adaptability during release cycles.
Code for Infrastructure
Infrastructure as Code describes system resources and topologies using an easily understood programming language that lets teams manage them like code.
Definitions stored within version control systems allow these definitions to be reviewed, changed or even completely overridden - similar to code!
Use of infrastructure as code allows teams to manage system resources reliably, reproducibly, and in an orderly way.
Infrastructure as code helps automate deployment while decreasing human error risk in large complex environments - especially true with regards to developing, testing, and producing identical environments across development, testing, production environments across datacenters or cloud platforms. It provides repeatable solutions with similar environments across development, testing production stages while making duplicating environments between datacenters or cloud platforms simpler and quicker than before.
Read More: How to Foster a Successful DevOps Culture: A Step by Step Guide
Configuration Management
Configuration management refers to the practice of overseeing wide range of resources within an information system - virtual machines, databases and servers.
Teams can reduce risks associated with changing system configuration by employing configuration management tools; such tools help teams keep tabs on system state while also monitoring for any drift that might result from resource changes over time.
Infrastructure as code makes it simple and flexible to automate system definitions and configurations for teams running complex environments at scale, saving both time and resources in running them effectively.
Continuous Monitoring
Continuous monitoring provides real-time visibility into the health and performance of an entire application stack in real-time, from infrastructure that runs it all the way up to higher-level components of software.
Telemetry data collected by different parts of a system are stored so they can later be queried or analyzed - giving full transparency into every element in real time.
DevOps teams that excel ensure they set actionable alerts and collect enough data so they can gain meaningful insights from this vast amount.
These insights allow the team to address issues immediately as well as refine applications during future development cycles.
Planning
DevOps teams define and describe features and capabilities in the planning phase. Teams can track progress on tasks at different levels of granularity.
This includes tracking the status of single products and multiple product portfolios. The following DevOps techniques are used by teams to plan with agility.
- Backlogs are created.
- Tracking bugs
- Scrum is a software development framework that helps you to manage agile software development.
- Use Kanban boards.
- Dashboards are a great way to visualize progress.
See How Microsoft plans DevOps for an overview of several lessons learned and the practices Microsoft has adopted to support DevOps across its software teams.
The Development of the Developing Countries
The development phase encompasses all aspects of creating software code. DevOps teams perform the following tasks in this phase:
- Select a development environment.
- Codes should be written, tested, reviewed, and integrated.
- Create artifacts that can be deployed in different environments.
- Use Git version control to work on code in parallel and collaborate.
DevOps teams must be able to innovate quickly without sacrificing stability, quality, or productivity.
- Make the most of your tools.
- Automate repetitive and manual tasks.
- Automated testing and continuous Integration (CI) allow you to iterate at a small pace.
To learn more about the practices Microsoft has adopted to help them transition to DevOps see How Microsoft develops using DevOps.
Delivery
Delivery is the process by which applications are consistently and reliably deployed into production environments.
This should be done via continuous delivery.
DevOps teams are involved in the delivery phase.
- Define a process for managing releases with stages of manual approval.
- Automate the process of moving applications from one stage to another.
- Automate the delivery process to make it repeatable, controlled and well-tested.
Delivery involves the deployment and configuration of infrastructure supporting delivery environments. DevOps teams use containers, microservices and infrastructure as code technology to establish fully governed environments for their deliverance operations.
Safety during deployment allows DevOps teams to deliver with confidence and ease. These best practices enable DevOps professionals to identify problems before they affect customer experiences.
How Microsoft Delivers Software Using DevOps provides an overview of how DevOps processes and principles have helped it create efficient delivery methods.
Operational teams strive for high system availability, security and reliability during this phase. DevOps teams may employ hybrid cloud environments or public cloud services like Azure for this task.
Teams can rapidly identify and address issues faster by employing automated delivery and safe deployment techniques.
To maintain vigilance, rich telemetry as well as actionable alerts is vitally important along with full visibility over all applications and systems involved.
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The Conclusion Of The Article Is:
DevOps is an approach that involves both operational and development teams in all phases of product creation. DevOps may require some work to implement, but it will eventually help you create a system that is agile and scalable and ready for rapid growth and change.
