DevOps

What Is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of practices, tools, and a cultural philosophy that automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams. It emphasizes team empowerment, cross-team communication and collaboration, and technology automation.

The DevOps movement began around 2007 when the software development and IT operations communities raised concerns about the traditional software development model, where developers who wrote code worked apart from operations who deployed and supported the code. The term DevOps, a combination of the words development and operations, reflects the process of integrating these disciplines into one, continuous process.

DevOps tools

DevOps tools address the key phases of the DevOps lifecycle. They empower DevOps practices by helping to improve collaboration, reduce context-switching, introduce automation, and enable observability and monitoring.

DevOps toolchains usually follow two approaches: an all-in-one or open toolchain. An all-in-one toolchain offers a complete solution that usually doesn’t integrate with other third-party tools, while an open toolchain allows for customization with different tools. There are pros and cons to both approaches.

An example of an open DevOps toolchain is Atlassian’s Open DevOps solution, which includes Jira as a foundation and integrates with leading vendors and marketplace apps.

How does DevOps work?

A DevOps team includes developers and IT operations working collaboratively throughout the product lifecycle, in order to increase the speed and quality of software deployment. It’s a new way of working, a cultural shift, that has significant implications for teams and the organizations they work for.

Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams are no longer “siloed.” Sometimes, these two teams merge into a single team where the engineers work across the entire application lifecycle — from development and test to deployment and operations — and have a range of multidisciplinary skills.

DevOps teams use tools to automate and accelerate processes, which helps to increase reliability. A DevOps toolchain helps teams tackle important DevOps fundamentals including continuous integration, continuous delivery, automation, and collaboration.

DevOps values are sometimes applied to teams other than development. When security teams adopt a DevOps approach, security is an active and integrated part of the development process. This is called DevSecOps.

The DevOps lifecycle

Because of the continuous nature of DevOps, practitioners use the infinity loop to show how the phases of the DevOps lifecycle relate to each other. Despite appearing to flow sequentially, the loop symbolizes the need for constant collaboration and iterative improvement throughout the entire lifecycle.

The DevOps lifecycle consists of six phases representing the processes, capabilities, and tools needed for development (on the left side of the loop) and operations (on the right side of the loop). Throughout each phase, teams collaborate and communicate to maintain alignment, velocity, and quality.

1.Plan

DevOps teams should adopt agile practices to improve speed and quality. Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams break work into smaller pieces to deliver incremental value.

2.Build

Git is a free and open source version control system. It offers excellent support for branching, merging, and rewriting repository history, which has led to many innovative and powerful workflows and tools for the development build process.

3.Continuous integration and delivery

CI/CD allows teams to release quality products frequently and predictably, from source code repository to production with automated workflows. Teams can merge code changes frequently, deploy feature flags, and incorporate end-to-end testing.

4.Monitor and alert

Quickly identify and resolve issues that impact product uptime, speed, and functionality. Automatically notify your team of changes, high-risk actions, or failures, so you can keep services on.

5.Operate

Manage the end-to-end delivery of IT services to customers. This includes the practices involved in design, implementation, configuration, deployment, and maintenance of all IT infrastructure that supports an organization’s services.

6.Continuous feedback

DevOps teams should evaluate each release and generate reports to improve future releases. By gathering continuous feedback, teams can improve their processes and incorporate customer feedback to improve the next release.

Benefits of DevOps

Speed

Teams that practice DevOps release deliverables more frequently, with higher quality and stability. In fact, the DORA 2019 State of DevOps report found that elite teams deploy 208 times more frequently and 106 times faster than low-performing teams. Continuous delivery allows teams to build, test, and deliver software with automated tools.

Improved collaboration

The foundation of DevOps is a culture of collaboration between developers and operations teams, who share responsibilities and combine work. This makes teams more efficient and saves time related to work handoffs and creating code that is designed for the environment where it runs.

Rapid deployment

By increasing the frequency and velocity of releases, DevOps teams improve products rapidly. A competitive advantage can be gained by quickly releasing new features and repairing bugs.

Quality and reliability

Practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery ensure changes are functional and safe, which improves the quality of a software product. Monitoring helps teams keep informed of performance in real-time.

Security

By integrating security into a continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment pipeline, DevSecOps is an active, integrated part of the development process. Security is built into the product by integrating active security audits and security testing into agile development and DevOps workflows.

DevOps practices

Continuous integration

Continuous integration is the practice of automating the integration of code changes into a software project. It allows developers to frequently merge code changes into a central repository where builds and tests are executed. This helps DevOps teams address bugs quicker, improve software quality, and reduce the time it takes to validate and release new software updates.

Continuous delivery

Continuous delivery expands upon continuous integration by automatically deploying code changes to a testing/production environment. It follows a continuous delivery pipeline, where automated builds, tests, and deployments are orchestrated as one release workflow.

Situational awareness

It is vital for every member of the organization to have access to the data they need to do their job as effectively and quickly as possible. Team members need to be alerted of failures in the deployment pipeline — whether systemic or due to failed tests — and receive timely updates on the health and performance of applications running in production. Metrics, logs, traces, monitoring, and alerts are all essential sources of feedback teams need to inform their work.

Automation

Automation is one of the most important DevOps practices because it enables teams to move much more quickly through the process of developing and deploying high-quality software. With automation the simple act of pushing code changes to a source code repository can trigger a build, test, and deployment process that significantly reduces the time these steps take.

Infrastructure as Code

Whether your organization has an on-premise data center or is completely in the cloud, having the ability to quickly and consistently provision, configure, and manage infrastructure is key to successful DevOps adoption. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) goes beyond simply scripting infrastructure configuration to treating your infrastructure definitions as actual code: using source control, code reviews, tests, etc.

Microservices

Microservices is an architectural technique where an application is built as a collection of smaller services that can be deployed and operated independently from each other. Each service has its own processes and communicates with other services through an interface. This separation of concerns and decoupled independent function allows for DevOps practices like continuous delivery and continuous integration.

Monitoring

DevOps teams monitor the entire development lifecycle — from planning, development, integration and testing, deployment, and operations. This allows teams to respond to any degradation in the customer experience, quickly and automatically. More importantly, it allows teams to “shift left” to earlier stages in development and minimize broken production changes.