Finally, always remember that DevOps describes a culture and a set of processes that bring development and operations teams together to complete software development. This “philosophy” allows organizations to create and improve products at a faster rate than they could with traditional software development approaches. Many such tools also promote core DevOps tenets of automation, collaboration, and integration between development and operations teams.
DevOps has become the gold standard in modern IT, but it means different things to different people. What exactly is DevOps, and why has the demand for it increased so fast? DevOps is a collaboration between development and operation teams, which enables continuous delivery of applications and services to our end users. Let’s go over DevOps fundamentals, understand why DevOps, and some of the tools why DevOps engineers are using today.
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. 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 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.
Critical security issues are dealt with as they become apparent, not after a threat or compromise has occurred. Managing runtime errors can be much more challenging for development teams as they can find their way into a public release without being noticed during the debugging phase. Such runtime errors are seldom caused by bad code and mostly relate to the operating system or architecture on which you are attempting to run the code. This makes it difficult to predict them without comprehensive pre-release testing of your software. A CI/CD tool can help by performing an in-depth runtime analysis of your project, business benefits of devops testing all functionalities across multiple OS and architectures, to ensure no bugs are shipped with your final release.
As the environments are integrated and the cycle is accelerated, we can concentrate our efforts on innovating, instead of putting out fires. Smaller batches of work are easier to understand, commit to, test, review and know when they are completed. These smaller batch sizes also contain less variation and risk, making deployment easier and, if something goes wrong, troubleshooting and recovery. Creating a culture of end-to-end responsibility where the whole team is accountable for the results, with no “finger-pointing” between the “Dev” and the “Ops” experts. Fostering a collaborative environment with communication, mutual trust, skill and idea sharing, and problem solving.
For DevOps to succeed, these barriers must be eliminated by adopting the "you build it, you run it" practice. This doesn’t mean there aren’t people or teams who specialize, only that the lines of communication and collaboration between teams are open and used. Another DevOps study, DORA’s State of DevOps 2019, found that elite practitioners release 208 times more frequently and 106 times faster than low-performing teams.
It is an agile process that increases the flexibility and reliability of your solutions. DevOps practices emphasize the orchestration of a team's efforts while maintaining the integrity of the development environment. So, a team will be able to maintain a great experience for users while making updates and changes to a product. 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.
However, you should not forget that normally it involves many variables and it’s a good idea to use an incremental approach to implementing DevOps in an organization. Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches. Agile teams focus on delivering work in smaller increments, instead of waiting for a single massive release date. Requirements, plans, and results are evaluated continuously, allowing teams to respond to feedback and pivot as necessary. Continuous integration is the practice of automating the integration of code changes into a software project.
Instead of manually checking code, CI/CD automates this process, from batching in a specified window to frequent commits. In addition to CI/CD, automated testing is essential to successful DevOps practices. Automated tests might include end-to-end testing, unit tests, integration tests, and performance tests. Read more about incorporating automation into your software development processes.