Devops

DevOps combines development (Dev) and operations (Ops) to unite people, process, and technology in application planning, development, delivery, and operations. DevOps enables coordination and collaboration between formerly siloed roles like development, IT operations, quality engineering, and security.

Teams adopt DevOps culture, practices, and tools to increase confidence in the applications they build, respond better to customer needs, and achieve business goals faster. DevOps helps teams continually provide value to customers by producing better, more reliable products.

DevOps and the application lifecycle

DevOps influences the application lifecyclethroughout its planning, development, delivery, and operations phases. Each phase relies on the other phases, and the phases aren't role-specific. A DevOps culture involves all roles in each phase to some extent.

The following diagram illustrates the phases of the DevOps application lifestyle:

DevOps goals and benefits

When a team adopts DevOps culture, practices, and tools, they can achieve amazing things:

Accelerate time to market

Through increased efficiencies, improved team collaboration, automation tools, and continuous deployment--teams are able to rapidly reduce the time from product inception to market launch.

Adapt to the market and competition

A DevOps culture demands teams have a customer-first focus. By marrying agility, team collaboration, and focus on the customer experience, teams can continuously deliver value to their customers and increase their competitiveness in the marketplace.

Maintain system stability and reliability

By adopting continuous improvement practices, teams are able to build in increased stability and reliability of the products and services they deploy. These practices help reduce failures and risk.

Improve the mean time to recovery

The mean time to recovery metric indicates how long it takes to to recover from a failure or breach. To manage software failures, security breaches, and continuous improvement plans, teams should measure and work to improve this metric.

Adopt a DevOps culture

To fully implement DevOps, you must adopt a DevOps culture. Cultivating a DevOps culture requires deep changes in the way people work and collaborate. When organizations commit to a DevOps culture, they create an environment for high-performing teams to evolve. While adopting DevOps practices automates and optimizes processes through technology, without a shift to a DevOps culture within the organization and its people, you won't gain the full benefits of DevOps.

The following image captures key aspects of Microsoft's live site culture.

The following practices are key components of a DevOps culture:

• Collaboration, visibility, and alignment: A hallmark of a healthy DevOps culture is collaboration between teams. Collaboration starts with visibility. Development, IT, and other teams should share their DevOps processes, priorities, and concerns with each other. By planning their work together, they are better positioned to align on goals and measures of success as they relate to the business.
• Shifts in scope and accountability: As teams align, they take ownership and become involved in other lifecycle phases—not just the ones central to their roles. For example, developers become accountable not only to the innovation and quality established in the develop phase, but also to the performance and stability their changes bring in the operate phase. At the same time, IT operators are sure to include governance, security, and compliance in the plan and develop phase.
• Shorter release cycles: DevOps teams remain agile by releasing software in short cycles. Shorter release cycles make planning and risk management easier since progress is incremental, which also reduces the impact on system stability. Shortening the release cycle also allows organizations to adapt and react to evolving customer needs and competitive pressure.
• Continuous learning: High-performing DevOps teams establish a growth mindset. They fail fast and incorporate learnings into their processes. They strive to continually improve, increase customer satisfaction, and accelerate innovation and market adaptability.