It is the age of digital transformation; therefore, most organizations are striving to transform their infrastructure to improve their software delivery performance. It will help them to bring new products and ideas to market faster than ever before.
These organizations achieve their goals by embracing DevOps. However, some business owners don’t know about DevOps: What is it, and Why Should You Care? So, their organization has already done DevOps and has automation, CI/CD pipeline, and getting faster with code deployments, but all short when it comes to production.
DevOps was just introduced in 2009, yet it has taken the business world by storm. It describes the modern IT practices that allow collaboration between software development teams and operation staff. This short guide will teach you all the important information related to DevOps.
What is DevOps
DevOps combines two terms: Dev means development, and Ops means operations. It is created to combine software engineering, operations culture, and practices to combine software development and operations. However, the primary goal of DeOps is to strongly integrate automation and monitoring of all steps of the software development life cycle, generally known as SDLC.
The steps included in the process are integration, testing, releasing, development, and infrastructure management. DevOps aims to shorten development cycles that increase deployment frequency and add quality with dependable releases that align closely with business objectives.
In the old days, development and operations roles were separate, leading to the knowledge gap between teams and a disjointed workflow. These problems are generally presented primarily in miscommunication and cross-team misconceptions, which causes release delays.
The software development life cycle consists of a series of pipelines; instead, this is the way it was thought of in the past. In addition, the process starts at the beginning and moves down the pipeline. Once it completes one, it moves on you to the next. Often the development and operations team may have a misinformed understanding of the other team’s responsibilities or capabilities, which can lead to issues within your pipeline.
Specific Techniques of DevOps
To apply the DevOps culture, teams implement the DevOps approach by applying some great techniques throughout the application life cycle. Some of these techniques help to speed up, automate and improve the execution of the particular stage.
However, others will help to multiple the stages and also helps teams to create holistic processes which will help to increase their productivity. Here are the specific techniques of DevOps.
Version Control
In this technique, teams work with code in versions, tracking fixes and changing the history to simplify code analysis and recovery. The version control technique is usually implemented using the version control systems like Git that let multiple developers work together to create code.
Moreover, these systems provide a clear process for combining code changes in the same files, solving conflicts, and rolling back changes in the initial states. This technique is the fundamental DevOps practice that helps the development teams to interact, share code writing tasks among other team members, and save all the codes for a quick recovery if necessary. It is also the most important element in other methodologies like continuous integration and infrastructure as code.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
Continuous integration, generally known as CI, is the software development technique. In this technique, the developers often combine the code changes into the master code branch. It uses automatic testing, which performs every time a new code is committed.
Thus the code in the main branch is always stable. On the other hand, continuous delivery (CD) is the regular automatic deployment of the latest versions of applications in the production environment. By automating the actions needed for deployment, teams reduce the likelihood of problems during the deployment process and create the conditions for more frequent updates.
The result of both techniques is the CI and CD process that includes full automation of all actions code committed and development in the production environment. Implementing CI and CD allows teams to focus on creating code, reduce costs and reduce the human impact of performing routine steps. They will also allow you to speed up the process of deploying new code and reduce the risk factors linked with it.
Flexible Software Development
Agile is an approach to software development that generally focuses on team collaboration, customer and user feedback, and high adaptability to change over short release cycles. The developer teams that use a flexible methodology constantly provide customers with changes and improvements, gather feedback, consider their wishes and needs and then adapt to these.
However, this methodology significantly differs from other more traditional systems, like the cascade methodology that provides for long release cycles with successive stages.
Conclusion
Here is a simple guide about DevOps: What Is It and Why Should You Care? However, moving forward with DevOps will lead to growth and development within your IT department.
While if you work hard with your DevOps teams, surely everything runs smoothly, and you will get all the benefits of DevOps almost immediately.
