DevOps is the combination of practices, cultural philosophies, and tools; in order to increase the speed at which organizations deliver applications and services. This results in evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This benefits the customers who will enjoy better services and the organization which will have a greater competitive edge.
DevOps means joining development and operations. These two teams form a single union, to oversee the total lifespan of an application: development, test, deployment, operations etc. and there are no limitations to the number of skills that can be developed when DevOps is involved. There's the possibility of quality assurance and security teams coming together in close conjunction with development and operations teams for the duration of the application's lifecycle.
These teams use practices to automate processes that historically have been manual and slow. They use a technology stack and tooling which help them operate and evolve applications quickly and reliably. These tools also help engineers independently accomplish tasks (for example, deploying code or provisioning infrastructure) that normally would have required help from other teams, and this further increases a team’s velocity.
Benefits of DevOps
SpeedFor customers to get quick services; for organizations to efficiently adapt to the changing market and for them to gain the needed competency for achieving their desired business results; a model that provides maximum speed is required. No better model than the DevOps model to make these results materialize. A quick release of updates is made possible as services are ultimately controlled by the teams.
Rapid delivery
When releases are fast because of an increase in speed; quick improvement and innovation of products follow suit. When there is a consistent release of new features and bugs are quickly fixed; you will retain your customers as their needs are promptly satisfied; thus, you don't lose them to your competitors. The software release process is automatic because of the uninterrupted integration and delivery practices.
Reliability
While your delivery is fast; DevOps ensures that the application updates and infrastructure changes remain qualitative regardless of speed--the consumers continue enjoying a positive experience. To be sure of the functionality and safety of each change, you should test it with continuous delivery and continuous integration. Using practices like logging and Monitoring ceaselessly gives you information about the performance.
Scale
The risk that comes with managing complex or changing systems can be minimized when you operate and manage your infrastructure and development processes at scale. They can be efficiently managed with automation and consistency. Your development, testing, and productive environment, for instance, can be more efficiently managed using infrastructure as code.
Improved collaboration
With ownership comes responsibility and accountability. When the teams are equipped with these, they become more effective--this is what the DevOps model brings about. Labor is divided between the development and operations teams. As they closely work together, time is saved and efficiency level is increased. For example, handover periods that involve writing codes that account for the background environment is placed at a minimal level.
Security
Automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques keep your security intact as you adopt the DevOps model. Compliance at scale can be defined and tracked using infrastructure as code and policy as code.
DevOps Practices
With the necessary tools, some key practices can boost the innovation speed of organizations. These practices involve automating and streamlining the software development and infrastructure management processes.One fundamental practice is to perform very frequent but small updates. This is how organizations innovate faster for their customers. These updates are usually more incremental in nature than the occasional updates performed under traditional release practices. Frequent but small updates make each deployment less risky. They help teams address bugs faster because teams can identify the last deployment that caused the error. Although the cadence and size of updates will vary, organizations using a DevOps model deploy updates much more often than organizations using traditional software development practices.
Another essential practice is implementing a microservices architecture. It is like a breakdown tool; it breaks down complex systems and makes projects simple and independent. Organizations can use microservices architecture to create less rigid applications and ensure quicker innovations. There are varying individual services in an application, with different functions that work independently of each other. This architecture minimizes the coordination overhead of updating applications and as each service is paired and owned by agile teams, the speed of an organization’s progress is increased.
To attend to the operational challenges that might arise because of the combination of microservices and increased release frequency; DevOps practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery come into play to ensure that reliability and safety are maintained even as a rapid delivery remains in progress. Infrastructure as code and configuration management are infrastructure automation practices that help to ensure that frequent changes do not affect the elasticity and response of computing resources.
Furthermore, engineers can track applications and infrastructure's performance using monitoring and logging, to keep them actively reactive to problems. Delivery is fast, updates are reliable and customers are satisfied with organizations that make use of these practices. Outlined below are important DevOps practices.
Continuous integration
With this software development practice; developers can as much as possible merge their code changes into a central repository before running automated builds and tests. Continuous integration ensures that bugs are quickly found and addressed, the quality of software improved, and time isn't wasted in validating and releasing new software updates.
Continuous delivery
Prior the release of a production, continuous delivery automatically builds, tests and prepares code changes. This software development practice deploys all code changes to a testing environment and a productive environment after the build stage, by expanding upon continuous integration. The right implementation of continuous delivery provides developers with a deployment-ready build artifact that has undergone series of standardized tests.
Microservices
The microservices architecture runs a set of small services in a single application. These services are independent of each other and communication between these services is by means of a well-defined interface that uses a lightweight mechanism--an HTTP-based application programming interface (API). Each service has a single function which matches microservices with business needs. There are different Frameworks or programming languages that can be used to write microservices and they can also be set to either function as a single or group of services.
Infrastructure as code
Code and software development techniques like version control and continuous integration are used to merge and provision infrastructure under this practice. The interaction with infrastructure is programmer based and at scale rather than a manual setup and configuration resource. The API-driven model of its cloud makes it possible for system administrators and developers to interact with the infrastructure as such. Code-based tools are used by engineers to interface with infrastructure; hence it is treated like an application code. There being code based makes it possible for infrastructure and servers to be quickly deployed, using fixed standards, also the latest patches and versions can either be updated or repetitively duplicated.
Configuration management
The operating system, host configuration, operational tasks etc. are automated with codes by developers and system administrators. As codes are used, configuration changes become standard and repeatable. This relieves developers and system administrators of the burden of configuring the operating system, system applications or server software manually.
Policy as code
The configuration of infrastructure and infrastructure itself are codified with the cloud. This makes it possible for organizations to dynamically monitor and enforce compliance. It enables the automatic tracking, validation, and reconfiguration of infrastructure. In that way, organizations can easily control changes over resources and security measures are properly and distributively enforced. The fact that resources that do not comply can be flagged automatically for further investigation or automatically restarted to comply, increases the speed level of teams within an organization.
Monitoring and logging
To gauge the impact that the performance of application and infrastructure have on consumers, organizations monitor metrics and logs. The data and logs generated by applications and infrastructure are captured, categorized and then analyzed by organizations to understand how users are impacted by changes or updates. This makes it easy to detect sources of unexpected problems or changes. It is necessary that there be a constant monitoring, to ensure a steady availability of services and an increment in the speed at which infrastructure is updated. When these data are analyzed in real-time, organizations proficiently monitor their services
Communication and collaboration
This is the key feature of DevOps model; as development and operations come together and share their responsibilities, team spirit is enhanced and communication skills are facilitated. Chat applications, project tracking systems, and wikis are some of the tools that can be used by not just developers and operations but also other teams like marketing or sales. This brings all parts of the organization closely together as they cooperate to see to the realization of goals and projects. Posted on Monday, March 06, 2017 by Henrico Dolfing