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DevOps stands for development and operations, which is a set of various tools and technologies used to perform various business processes when combined. It facilitates IT processes across all departments, streamlining communication and collaboration for improved productivity.
Developing software or web applications requires a complex process from conceptualization to deployment. It follows multiple intricate stages of development with multi-phase testing of a software or web application before being carried out into production.
Sometimes, it becomes a time-consuming software application development process due to some specific needs, major challenges, and business complexities. To make the software or application development process shorter, smoother, and faster, many developers are following a universal set of practices called the DevOps lifecycle.
In this article, we will cover everything about DevOps, its development lifecycle, tools, and much more. Let’s dive into the DevOps lifecycle and its uses in software development.
What is DevOps?
DevOps refers to the combination of development and operations, a software development methodology used to integrate various business processes and bridge the gap between development and operational departments, facilitating communication across the organization. It covers exercising various tasks for application development in a professional manner.
To simplify, the combination of software development and IT operations is known as DevOps, and the process of carrying out various tasks in software or application development is referred to as the DevOps development lifecycle.
The DevOps methodology is a natural evolution of Agile and continuous delivery approaches, making software or application development faster through a unified, continuous set of processes.
Implementing DevOps into your business can help you gain competitive advantages, taking your organization to greater heights of success with improved performance in a better working environment, quicker time to market through a continuous delivery model, and faster response to customer needs.
History Of DevOps
IT companies used to have two separate teams, known as the Development Team and the Operations Team, before the introduction of DevOps. Software developers working on software development use tools to write and test code several times to ensure it works perfectly.
After that, the code was given to the operational team for execution and release, allowing them to run the code. The operations team is responsible for checking application performance, security, and any issues, then reporting back to the development team about any bugs that exist.
As the process suggests, it may cause some conflict between the development and operations teams in order to achieve good results in a shorter time, as both teams are used to working separately.
For example, if the developer wrote the code that works for the i5 processor, 16GB storage, and when the code comes to the operation team they are executing the same code for i3 and 8GB, they will make the code faulty even if this could be a problem in their system environment or any missing library application.
To overcome this problem, DevOps was introduced to bridge the gap between developers and operations, enabling them to collaborate and express their ideas and concerns to achieve the best and most desirable output in the shortest time possible. It has led to streamlining development and operational processes, enabling the continuous delivery of software or applications without any hassle.
To fix the problem, DevOps enables developers to package their code in a container, a type of lightweight software environment. It contains all the necessary software, summarized in it, which is required to run the code or application at its desired level.
When developer test their code, they simply pass on this container along with the code to the operation team, so they can run the container along with the code for smooth functioning. That’s the history of DevOps and how it was introduced.
How does DevOps work? – The complete DevOps lifecycle
DevOps is an advanced software development methodology designed to remove all barriers between the development team and the operations team. In the DevOps model, both development and operations teams collaborate throughout the entire software application life cycle, spanning from idea and conceptualization to development, testing, and deployment. DevOps helps achieve high-quality products with a quicker time to market and significantly reduced costs.
The DevOps cycle involves planning, development, testing, deployment, release, and monitoring of the application, all while coordinating with different IT departments. The complete DevOps lifecycle includes the following seven stages:
1. Continuous Development
This is the first stage, which includes planning and coding for software development. The project vision is determined during the initial planning phase, when developers begin writing the code for the software application. DevOps utilizes several tools to maintain code without requiring additional tools for planning.
2. Continuous Integration
This phase is one of the most crucial stages in the entire DevOps lifecycle. This is the most commonly used software development practice among developers, involving frequent changes to the source code.
The changes may happen daily or weekly, depending on the situation. It involves frequent changes in the code, unit testing, code review, integration testing, and more to ensure that everything is up to the line. It includes the integration of updated code with the existing functionality to support and make it available for end-users.
3. Continuous Testing
Continuous testing is the stage where software or applications are continuously tested for bugs. It utilizes powerful tools such as TestNG, Selenium, JUnit, and others for continuous testing. QA testers utilize these tools to perfect multiple code bases, ensuring there are no functionality breaks.
This phase utilizes Docker containers to simulate the test environment. Automation helps save a significant amount of time and effort in testing.
4. Continuous Monitoring
As part of the DevOps process, monitoring encompasses all factors that contribute to the software’s efficiency, where information is tracked and carefully analyzed to identify trends and pinpoint problem areas. In most cases, monitoring is integrated with the operational capabilities of software applications.
It helps to resolve various system errors, including server unreachability, low memory, high bandwidth usage, and CPU overload, thereby enhancing the security and availability of the service.
5. Continuous Feedback
This phase helps to improve application development by frequently analyzing results from the software operations.
This is a process where a developer receives constant feedback on the application and then explains its strengths and weaknesses to bring further improvements to the software. It helps to make the application better, more efficient, and more reliable with continuous feedback.
6. Continuous Deployment
This is the phase where developers deploy the code to the live server. It involves detailed checking to ensure the code is used correctly for each server. In this phase, new and updated code is continuously deployed to the server using configuration management tools such as SaltStack, Puppet, and Chef. Various containerization tools are utilized during the deployment phase, helping to establish consistency across development, staging, testing, and production environments.
7. Continuous Operations
All DevOps operations help organizations to automate their IT operations and streamline workflows to build high-quality software or applications with quicker time to market, as they are based on the continuity of automation.
In the discussion, it is evident that continuity is a key component of DevOps, as it eliminates steps that distract from development, delay issue detection, and ultimately result in a better product over time.
DevOps enables developers to build software or applications that are more efficient, robust, and scalable, ultimately increasing business productivity and driving greater ROI.
What are the Benefits of DevOps?
DevOps provides numerous benefits to organizations, allowing them to produce high-grade software products with faster time to market and proven DevOps methodology combined with leading technologies.
Developers working on DevOps get work done faster, streamline quick responses, and facilitate communication across all IT departments. The top benefits of DevOps include:
High-quality product with faster time releases
DevOps helps speed up product release times with the help of continuous delivery, allowing software developers to quickly resolve issues or fix bugs in the early phases through continuous application feedback. The team practicing DevOps can focus more on producing top-grade software products by automating all processes more efficiently.
Respond faster to user needs
DevOps enables developers to quickly respond to change requests based on user feedback, add or update new features, and customize existing functionality. It results in releasing software products with a quicker time to market and greater efficiency.
Improved working environment
DevOps adheres to the best principles and practices that facilitate communication and collaboration across teams, thereby enhancing the productivity and agility of software development applications.
Developers working on DevOps have been proven to be significantly more productive and experts in building quality software in less time. It enables development and operations teams to collaborate on acquiring the best possible products with optimal results.
Thus, DevOps is not only a set of practices but a philosophy that streamlines communication across the development and operational teams. It mainly focuses on providing a way to alter the way people work, so it doesn’t require constant code changes.
The success of your DevOps application depends on how you adhere to DevOps principles and practices.
What are DevOps Tools and DevOps Toolchain?
DevOps Tools are the applications that automate the software development process to get the desired product to market faster. These tools help focus on facilitating collaboration and communication among software developers, operations professionals, and product managers. It helps eliminate context switching and improve automation and monitoring processes.
A DevOps toolchain contains tools and technologies that enable both development and operations teams to communicate and collaborate throughout the entire DevOps software development lifecycle.
It encompasses DevOps fundamentals, including continuous delivery, continuous integration, continuous feedback, automation, and collaboration.
Which are the best DevOps practices?
Implementing DevOps practices can help streamline the software development process more efficiently. DevOps employs best practices to optimize your development.
Build a collaborative culture: This is a proven DevOps practice that improves collaboration and communication among development, operations, and other teams.
Use the right tools: DevOps utilizes the right tools to track performance metrics, display warnings when issues arise, or provide complete visibility into software development progress.
Adopt CI/CD model: Continuous integration (CI) is the most used DevOps practice for integrating code changes from multiple developers into a central repository. Continuous delivery (CD) begins where continuous integration stops. DevOps utilizes continuous delivery to integrate code from continuous integration into the production environment.
Utilize Agile Development Management: DevOps employs the agile development approach, enabling software developers to deliver higher-quality products more efficiently.
Monitor the right metrics: DevOps practices can help you monitor the right metrics to detect when things go wrong, allowing for quick recovery.
Switching to microservices: Microservices are the best fit for the DevOps approach, as they help break large and complex projects into smaller, manageable pieces.
DevOps adoption: The DevOps culture, methods, and challenges
DevOps adoption enables organizations to effectively integrate DevOps capabilities, tools, and practices, thereby improving the efficiency and productivity of their software products.
DevOps Culture:
Development and operations work together to build software. DevOps culture describes their detailed understanding of each other’s work. It helps to improve transparency, streamline communication, and facilitate collaboration across development, IT operations, and other teams.
DevOps Methods:
The DevOps method is a development methodology used to improve work throughout the entire software development lifecycle. The DevOps process can be visualized as an infinite loop that comprises various phases, including planning, coding, building, testing, releasing, deploying, operating, monitoring, and providing feedback on the software application.
DevOps Challenges:
The following are the major DevOps challenges that you often face:
- Switching to microservices from traditional infrastructure.
- Converting predefined processes to more efficient ones.
- Integrating different tools for multiple domains.
- Lack of expertise in the industry.
- Individual tool sets for the Dev and Ops teams.
- Getting all on board.
- Changing organizational culture.
- Adoption of advanced tools.
Read More: How Containerization Transforms DevOps Workflows?
What are DevSecOps and DevSecOps vs DevOps?
DevSecOps is defined as a short for development, security, and operations. In DevSecOps, the organization aims to do so on an equal basis with decisions and actions on operations and development for implementing security decisions and actions.
DevSecOps vs. DevOps
DevOps is a modern development methodology that employs various practices, including continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), the creation of microservices, and the use of infrastructure for code execution. DevSecOps applies to vulnerability testing, incident management, and threat modeling.
DevOps’ primary objective is to maximize the reliability, efficiency, and security of software development, thereby achieving the greatest level of success. In addition to automating processes, DevSecOps focuses on quality assurance and code reliability.
Who is a DevOps engineer, and what are DevOps engineer skills, roles, and responsibilities?
DevOps engineers are software developers who design, build, test, deploy software or applications, and maintain the infrastructure and tools, enabling faster development and quicker software releases.
Key Skills of DevOps Engineers:
- Excellent teamwork and communication skills.
- Solid knowledge of programming languages.
- Solid understanding of problem-solving skills.
- Excellent organizational and time management skills.
- Potential to work on different projects at the same time.
- Familiar with DevOps and Agile principles.
Key roles & responsibilities of DevOps engineers include:
- Creating and configuring new infrastructure and development tools.
- Analyzing technical issues and addressing the needs.
- Understanding customers’ needs and explaining this to developers.
- Experience with testing, analyzing, and determining code written by others.
- Ensuring the system is protected against cybersecurity malware.
- Worked on methods to automate and improve development and release processes.
- Help plan out projects and make good decisions in project management.
- Experience working with software developers and software engineers to ensure the development process is taken out carefully as intended.
Crest Infosystems DevOps team, their roles, and responsibilities
At Crest Infosystems, we have a passionate team of DevOps engineers with years of experience and expertise in developing DevOps software and applications. Our development and operations DevOps team works together across the entire DevOps lifecycle to improve the speed and quality of software deployment. Working with our DevOps teams, you will receive high-quality software products with a quicker time to market, while maintaining seamless communication and collaboration throughout the entire software development process.
Our DevOps Roles & Responsibilities
Our DevOps software engineers play a crucial role in building, testing, and deploying software or applications that address all your business needs and drive revenue. The following are some of the key roles and responsibilities of our DevOps engineers, which include:
- Understanding customer needs and different project KPIs.
- Managing daily, weekly, and monthly reports about the progress of the project.
- Expertise in bringing continuous improvement by doing continuous integration, continuous development, and constant deployment pipeline.
- Managing team and external interfaces.
- Configuring various tools and IT infrastructure
- Identifying and setting up development, update, test, release, and support procedures for DevOps operation.
- Implementing various automations, development, testing tools, and IT infrastructure.
- Expertise in reviewing, verifying, and validating the code of the software development.
- Troubleshooting skills and identifying and fixing the bugs.
- Planning project management strategy and being involved in project management activities.
- Building automated processes when needed.
- Implementing and deploying cybersecurity measures by consistently performing security checks.
- Identifying the root cause and resolving the technical issue.
- Coordinating within the team and with clients.
- Choosing, implementing, and deploying the right CI/CD tools.
- Monitoring DevOps development processes and adopting new ways to further improve and reduce time.
- Handling and guiding the other teams
- Analyzing and measuring user experience and KPIs.
