Software development is one of the most demanding and rapidly changing industries in the modern marketplace. The staggering rate of evolution means software teams need a methodology that is both flexible and robust to quickly develop secure and effective code.
DevOps is one such framework. Here’s how it works.
What is DevOps?
Although it launched in 2001 with high hopes, agile software development failed to impress many critics. They claimed it displayed a disconnect between iterative, rapid code generation and deployment. By 2007, agile’s limitations and ITIL’s complex change management requirements left software developers frustrated and advocating for change.
In 2009, software development consultant Patrick Debois released the DevOps framework, which helped bridge this gap. DevOps is a set of philosophies, practices, and tools that facilitate high-speed software development, evolution, and deployment.
The methodology integrates development (Dev) and IT operational (Op) disciplines to create a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) process based on empowerment, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and automation. This process rapidly delivers new and improved products to users.
Even better, organizations could deploy DevOps with agile methodologies like Kanban or Scrum to give teams the best of both worlds.
How do agile and DevOps interrelate to create a single comprehensive work framework? Agile sets the stage for learning, skills development, and team input, while DevOps encourages collaboration and ownership through process automation. Together, they establish efficient workflows that support consistent goal achievement and value delivery.
Benefits of DevOps
The DevOps methodology comes with a host of advantages.
- Shorter development time: Taking ownership of the final product empowers teams to innovate in response to evolving markets. The steady development pace boosts efficiency and drives business results.
- Faster delivery: With faster development, teams can rapidly respond to changing customer needs by releasing new features and bug fixes, securing the company’s position in the marketplace.
- Increased reliability: Despite the rapid pace, DevOps practices like CI/CD, monitoring, and logging can still evaluate output quality in real time, maintaining a positive user experience by ensuring updates are safe and functional.
- Simplified scaling: DevOps infrastructure and processes are scalable, allowing IT to manage evolving systems efficiently with reduced risk.
- Better collaboration: The DevOps philosophy emphasizes team ownership and accountability. Team members collaborate on tasks, combining workflows to improve efficiency and save time.
- Improved security: DevOps encourages teams to automate security compliance and control practices, allowing teams to work quickly while safeguarding user data.
How does DevOps work?
DevOps improves processes by establishing a team, including developers and IT operations, to collaborate throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC), boosting speed and improving quality.
DevOps engineers contribute to every lifecycle stage, including testing and deployment. These additional responsibilities require engineers to develop an expanded, multidisciplinary skill set. Some groups integrate business teams (BizDevOps) and security (DevSecOps) to create a holistic working group that delivers greater value.
The DevOps team creates an infinite process loop for product refinement. Elements of the loop include:
- Planning
- Coding
- Building
- Testing
- Releasing
- Deploying
- Operating
- Monitoring
This iterative progression gives the development team the flexibility to adjust, innovate, and take risks that the traditional waterfall methodology doesn’t allow.
IT teams use automation, such as the CI/CD pipeline, to increase production velocity by transitioning code from development to deployment and back again. The workflow relies on standardized QA criteria to vet changes before to deployment, resulting in significant time savings.
Along with the DevOps pipeline, the methodology speeds delivery by dividing a product into small, independent features that integrate into a single solution. This breakdown allows developers to deploy new or updated functions independently.
The DevOps lifecycle
The DevOps lifecycle follows a product for as long as it remains viable, starting at inception and continuing through maintenance and security upgrades. The cycle follows nine stages in two loops:
Development loop
- Plan: Leaders organize and prioritize development tasks. Then, they track completion.
- Create: The team designs and develops the code while managing security to protect the programming and other project data.
- Verify: Automated testing QAs the code to ensure it meets performance criteria and quality standards.
- Package: Containerization gathers the application, its dependencies, and artifacts into one location, making them easier to manage.
Operations loop
- Secure: The team tests for security vulnerabilities using static and dynamic tests, fuzz testing, and dependency scanning.
- Release: The product or upgrade is launched in the marketplace.
- Configure: The infrastructure’s configuration and fitness are evaluated to ensure it supports the application.
- Monitor: Performance metrics, user feedback, and bug tracking are reviewed to address issues before they severely impact usability and customer satisfaction.
Once stage eight is complete, the cycle begins again, developing new product functionalities and updating existing features.
DevOps best practices
DevOps is challenging to implement, but you can set your team up for success by establishing these approaches early in the process:
1. Continuous integration
Instead of developers working in silos, continuous integration merges workflows and delivers code into a central repository that automatically executes builds and testing. Continuous integration lets DevOps teams quickly address defects while improving quality, reducing validation time, and deploying software updates faster.
2. Continuous delivery
Expand upon the continuous integration model by establishing a development pipeline that automatically deploys the updated code to a testing and production environment. Once the build is complete and tested, teams launch the code using a single-release workflow.
3. Automation
Automations like code pushes that trigger the build-test-deployment cycle can significantly reduce the time required to complete these processes while decreasing the impact of human error.
4. Infrastructure as code
Successful DevOps implementation and rapid deployment depend on the team’s ability to reliably allocate, configure, and manage its technology architecture. Treating infrastructure as actual code means the group leverages source control, code reviews, and testing while facilitating configuration management and improving equipment integrity and adaptability.
5. Microservices
DevOps teams divide an application into smaller features with individual processes that operate and deploy independently. Microservices communicate with each other via a common interface. Feature independence allows teams to integrate each feature individually into the CI/CD pipeline for speedier upgrades.
6. Monitoring and logging
Monitoring bug reports and user logs allows teams to respond quickly and automatically to performance or functionality issues. It also maintains customer experience integrity while permitting an easy transition from the operations loop of the DevOps cycle back to development for changes.
DevOps tools
Numerous tools and applications exist to create a toolchain that addresses processes within the lifecycle, reducing the workload for DevOps engineers and programmers. There are two types of toolchains:
- Open: An open toolchain solution uses a foundation application (e.g., Atlassian’s Jira) that integrates with third-party applications from various vendors.
- All-in-one: An all-in-one solution offers a comprehensive system of applications, facilitating work through all lifecycle phases. This type of toolchain doesn’t integrate with third-party applications.
Tools for various DevOps processes
Hoping to customize an open solution toolchain? These applications support DevOps processes and lifecycle phases:
Build
Many open-source tools replicate production environments, allowing teams to quickly develop compliant code.
Products: Kubernetes, Docker
Using infrastructure as code lets developers apply and reapply provisioned code to create a server baseline to establish the development environment. The code can be version-controlled and tested before incorporation into the CI/CD.
Products: Ansible, Docker, Puppet
Monitor the source code’s evolution by storing it in a version control repository that notifies teams of changes. Alerts allow them to review the proposed modifications before pushing them live, reducing the risk of bugs and incidents.
Products: Bitbucket, Git, Gitlab, GitHub
Continuous delivery
Invest in a continuous delivery system that automatically checks code stored within its repository for faults. If the system identifies a bug, the team can intervene and roll out updates and new features before there’s a significant negative impact.
Products: Jenkins, Bitbucket, CircleCi
Deploy
Monitor change, test, and deployment data from a single dashboard integrated with the code repository and deployment tools.
Products: Atlassian Jira
Automating deployment can also speed up the process.
Products: Bitbucket, Zephyr
Operate
Facilitate collaboration and manage incident, change, and problem tracking within a single system to ensure all updates are linked and traced to the problem’s source.
Products: Atlassian Jira, Opsgenie
Observe
Automated monitoring services take two forms: server monitoring and application performance monitoring. For fast responses, seek applications that broadcast incident alerts across all team communication channels.
Products: Opsgenie, Nagios, Slack
The best DevOps ally
Roadmapping processes that use software templates can help DevOps engineers standardize workflows and produce consistently high-quality code. Tempo’s Strategic Roadmaps application creates audience-friendly software development visualizations to help your team develop implementation plans, prioritize ideas, and centralize team collaboration.
