What is DevOps?

This blog post is the first post of my new series where we will learn the use of the most popular CI/CD tools. But first we will understand tha philosophy behind this tools.

What is DevOps?

The word DevOps is a combination of the terms development (Dev) and operations (Ops), meant to represent a collaborative or shared approach to the tasks performed by a company’s application development and IT operations teams.

DevOps explained

In its broadest meaning, DevOps is a philosophy that automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams. It emphasizes team empowerment, cross-team communication and collaboration, and technology automation. In its most narrow interpretation, DevOps describes the adoption of iterative software development, automation, and programmable infrastructure deployment and maintenance.

The DevOps movement began around 2007 when the software development and IT operations communities raised concerns about the traditional software development model, where developers who wrote code worked apart from operations who deployed and supported the code.

How does DevOps work?

A DevOps team includes developers and IT operators working together, in order to increase the speed and quality of software deployment. It’s a new way of working, a cultural shift, that has significant implications for teams and the organizations they work for.

Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams are no longer “siloed.” Sometimes, these two teams merge into a single team or every development team get a new member wo is a devops engineer.

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.

DevOps values are sometimes applied to teams other than development. When security teams adopt a DevOps approach, security is an active and integrated part of the development process. This is called DevSecOps.

DevOps and the application lifecycle

DevOps influences the application lifecycle throughout 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.

Discover

Building software is a team sport. In preparation for the upcoming sprint, teams must workshop to explore, organize, and prioritize ideas. Ideas must align to strategic goals and deliver customer impact. Agile can help guide DevOps teams.

Planning

DevOps teams should adopt agile practices to improve speed and quality. Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams break work into smaller pieces to deliver incremental value.

Build

Git is a free and open source version control system. It offers excellent support for branching, merging, and rewriting repository history, which has led to many innovative and powerful workflows and tools for the development build process.

Test

Continuous integration (CI) allows multiple developers to contribute to a single shared repository. When code changes are merged, automated tests are run to ensure correctness before integration. Merging and testing code often help development teams gain reassurance in the quality and predictability of code once deployed.

Deploy

Continuous deployment (CD) allows teams to release features frequently into production in an automated fashion. Teams also have the option to deploy with feature flags, delivering new code to users steadily and methodically rather than all at once. This approach improves velocity, productivity, and sustainability of software development teams.

Operate

Manage the end-to-end delivery of IT services to customers. This includes the practices involved in design, implementation, configuration, deployment, and maintenance of all IT infrastructure that supports an organization’s services.

Observe

Quickly identify and resolve issues that impact product uptime, speed, and functionality. Automatically notify your team of changes, high-risk actions, or failures, so you can keep services on.

Continuous feedback

DevOps teams should evaluate each release and generate reports to improve future releases. By gathering continuous feedback, teams can improve their processes and incorporate customer feedback to improve the next release.

Benefits of DevOps

Speed

Move at high velocity so you can innovate for customers faster, adapt to changing markets better, and grow more efficient at driving business results. The DevOps model enables your developers and operations teams to achieve these results. For example, microservices and continuous delivery let teams take ownership of services and then release updates to them quicker.

Rapid Delivery

Increase the frequency and pace of releases so you can innovate and improve your product faster. The quicker you can release new features and fix bugs, the faster you can respond to your customers’ needs and build competitive advantage. Continuous integration and continuous delivery are practices that automate the software release process, from build to deploy.

Scale

Operate and manage your infrastructure and development processes at scale. Automation and consistency help you manage complex or changing systems efficiently and with reduced risk. For example, infrastructure as code helps you manage your development, testing, and production environments in a repeatable and more efficient manner.

Improved Collaboration

Build more effective teams under a DevOps cultural model, which emphasizes values such as ownership and accountability. Developers and operations teams collaborate closely, share many responsibilities, and combine their workflows. This reduces inefficiencies and saves time (e.g. reduced handover periods between developers and operations, writing code that takes into account the environment in which it is run).

Security

Move quickly while retaining control and preserving compliance. You can adopt a DevOps model without sacrificing security by using automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques. For example, using infrastructure as code and policy as code, you can define and then track compliance at scale. Sometimes they called this DevSecOps.

Reliability

Ensure the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes so you can reliably deliver at a more rapid pace while maintaining a positive experience for end users. Use practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery to test that each change is functional and safe. Monitoring and logging practices help you stay informed of performance in real-time.

Why DevOps Matters

Software and the Internet have transformed the world and its industries, from shopping to entertainment to banking. Software no longer merely supports a business; rather it becomes an integral component of every part of a business. Companies interact with their customers through software delivered as online services or applications and on all sorts of devices. They also use software to increase operational efficiencies by transforming every part of the value chain, such as logistics, communications, and operations. In a similar way that physical goods companies transformed how they design, build, and deliver products using industrial automation throughout the 20th century, companies in today’s world must transform how they build and deliver software.

DevOps Tools

The DevOps model relies on effective tooling to help teams rapidly and reliably deploy and innovate for their customers. These tools automate manual tasks, help teams manage complex environments at scale, and keep engineers in control of the high velocity that is enabled by DevOps. In the next posts we will learn hiw to use this tools.