What is DevOps?
Development operations (DevOps) merges and automates the efforts of software development and IT operations. This means that the two teams that formerly worked separately from one another join hands to ensure efficient and quality delivery.
DevOps combines cultural principles, tactics, and resources that increase the organization's capacity to deliver apps and services. It develops and boosts operational efficiency compared to conventional software development and technology management processes. To work as effectively as possible, engineers often turn to DevOps platforms to perform and manage continuous delivery.
The most remarkable DevOps cultures and practices draw on contributions from all application stakeholders: platform and infrastructure engineering, security, compliance, governance, risk management, line-of-business, end-users, and customers.
Types of DevOps
The role of DevOps is fairly general as it describes an approach for creating and deploying software. Tweaking this methodology for different departments and tasks produces good results. Below are a few of the specific areas that DevOps has joined:
- NetDevOps/NetOps brings DevOps practices into the networking world. More configuration is automated through software-defined networking. NetDevOps offers several advantages ranging from the simplicity of deployment utilizing network automation to the stricter quality checks and testing done with a continuous deployment approach.
- DevSecOps/SecOps integrates security and software. It helps security applications become more responsive and secure since threats can be detected as they occur.
- DataOps is a method in which teams working on data analytics improve quality and turnaround time, much like DevOps has done for software development.
- CloudOps applies DevOps principles to a cloud-native environment. As cloud providers make completely programmable application programming interfaces (APIs) available on their systems, automating these deployments is quite simple.
- ChatOps is responsible for putting bots in charge. It allows bots to perform automated tasks based on natural language input. ChatOps works on building workflows to allow a higher degree of automation.
- AIOps/MLOps is an approach to NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to integrate systems and automate IT operations. With this technology, systems can detect problems, send alerts, open tickets, and perform other tasks without human intervention.
- NoOps is short for “no operations". The concept here is that developers automate everything in the IT department with a self-service infrastructure. This idea fully automates operations while using DevOps principles for testing and continuous improvement, and continuous deployment (CI/CD).
DevOps stages
DevOps lifecycle stages and representations may differ for each product, but they usually boil down to these stages:
- Planning: Developers ideate the new features and functionality for the release. The ideas are taken from prioritized end-user feedback, case studies, and input from all internal stakeholders. The aim is to maximize the product's value by producing features to deliver the desired outcome.
- Development: In this stage, developers test, code, and create new and improved features based on user stories and backlog items. It's typical to combine techniques like pair programming, peer code reviews, and test-driven development (TDD). Before sending their code down the continuous delivery process, developers frequently execute the "inner loop" on their local workstations by writing and testing the code.
- Continuous delivery/integration: The newly designed code is integrated into the existing one, tested, and packaged to execute for deployment. Examples of routine automation tasks include checking out the code from a source code repository, merging code changes into a "master" copy, and automating the compilation, unit testing, and executable packaging. When it comes to a binary repository, companies should save this phase output for the next stage.
- Continuous deployment: The newly designed code integrated with the existing one goes through automated testing and is released automatically into the production environment. The integration runtime build output is launched to a runtime environment, typically a deployment environment where automated tests are carried out for quality, safety, and privacy. Developers can spot and fix any issues if they find any defects before end users see them. Common environments for development, testing, and production each need stricter quality gates than the previous one. When deploying to a production environment, starting with a small subset of users is usually best before expanding to all users once reliability has been established.
- Operations: This stage happens once the features are delivered to a production environment and are up and running. Monitoring feature behavior, performance, and availability guarantees that the features create value for end users. Businesses must ensure the network, storage, platform, computer, and security posture are sound. Operations guarantee that features are functioning properly and there are no service outages. When something goes wrong, operations alert teams to the incident so that the appropriate workers can implement a solution.
- Learning/continuous feedback: In this stage, feedback is collected from end users and customers based on the features, functionality, performance, and business value. DevOps takes this feedback to plan for enhancements and features for the next release. It also means that developers can actively avoid past incidents. This stage makes certain that there is continuous improvement.
- Continuous testing: An effective way of identifying risks and vulnerabilities is through testing, which allows IT to accept, reduce, or eliminate hazards.
- Security: DevOps integrates security from the beginning when safety issues are easiest and least expensive to address. This goes on for the rest of the development cycle. “Shifting left” is the term used to address this type of approach to security.
- Compliance: This step is best addressed in the early stages of the development lifecycle. Regulated sectors often provide observability, traceability, and access requirements for delivering and managing features. To achieve this, policies in the continuous delivery workflow and the runtime environment should be planned, developed, tested, and enforced.
Benefits of DevOps
DevOps means development and operational teams are no longer siloed. They offer a lot of benefits to their users, including:
- Short development cycles and rapid innovation.
- Decreased rollbacks, deployment delays, and recovery times.
- Better interaction and cooperation.
- Improved performance.
- New opportunities for professional advancement.
- More deployment frequency.
DevOps vs. agile
DevOps brings together development and operations teams. Agile is a continuous strategy emphasizing cooperation, customer feedback, and rapid releases. While DevOps emphasizes constant testing and delivery, agile works on ongoing changes.
Agile doesn’t need a big team, but DevOps demands a somewhat large group. DevOps uses both shift-left and shift-right, while Agile uses only the shift-right principle.
DevOps targets end-to-end business solutions and quick turnaround, whereas Agile focuses on software development. It concentrates on functional and non-functional preparation, while DevOps is more concerned with operational and business readiness.
Learn more about agile to understand the project management style that achieves goals through incremental progress.
Sagar Joshi
Sagar Joshi is a former content marketing specialist at G2 in India. He is an engineer with a keen interest in data analytics and cybersecurity. He writes about topics related to them. You can find him reading books, learning a new language, or playing pool in his free time.
