Table of Contents:
- What is DevOps?
- History Of DevOps
- How does DevOps work? – The complete DevOps lifecycle
- What are the Benefits of DevOps?
- What are DevOps Tools and DevOps Toolchain?
- Which are the best DevOps practices?
- DevOps adoption: The DevOps culture, methods, and challenges
- What are DevSecOps and DevSecOps vs DevOps?
- Who is a DevOps engineer, and what are DevOps engineer skills, roles, and responsibilities?
- Crest Infosystems DevOps team, their roles, and responsibilities
DevOps stands for development and operations, which is a set of various tools and technologies used to perform various business processes when combined. It helps in facilitating IT processes across all departments and streamlines communication and collaboration for better 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 development and operations, which is a combined software development methodology used to carry out various business processes together to bridge the gap between development and operational departments and facilitate communication across the organization. It covers exercising various tasks for application development in a professional manner.
To make it simple, the combination of software development and IT operations is called DevOps and the process to carry out several tasks of software or application development is called DevOps development lifecycle. DevOps methodology is a type of natural addition of Agile and continuous delivery approaches that makes software or application development faster using a unified continuous set of processes.
Implementing DevOps into your business can help gain competitive advantages that take your organization to the greater height of success with improved performance in a better working environment, quicker time to market with a continuous delivery model, and response to customers faster.
History Of DevOps
IT companies used to have two separate teams called Development Team and Operations Team before DevOps was introduced. Software developers working on software development used to write and test code several times to make sure it works perfectly or not. After that, the code was given for execution to the operational team to release and run the code. The operations team is used to check application performance, security, or any issues then report back to the development team about any bugs that exist.
As the process suggests, it may somewhat be causing conflict between the development and operations teams to acquire good results in a quicker time as both used to work 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, allowing them to work together to express their ideas, and concerns to get the best and desirable output in a minimum time. It has given rise to streamlining development and operational processes to get continuous delivery of software or applications without any hassle.
To fix the problem, DevOps allows developers to summarize their code in a container which is 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 DevOps history 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 work together throughout the complete software application life cycle ranging from idea & conceptualization to development, testing, and deployment. DevOps helps to achieve high-quality products with quicker time to market and at 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 that includes planning and coding the software development. The project vision is determined at the initial planning phase where developers start writing the code of the software application. DevOps uses several tools to maintain the code without requiring any tool for planning.
2. Continuous Integration
This phase is one of the most important phases of the entire DevOps lifecycle. This is the most used software development practice by developers in making 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 continuous testing of software or applications is carried out for bugs. It uses powerful tools like TestNG, Selenium, JUnit, and more for continuous testing. QA testers utilize these tools to perfect multiple code bases to ensure there’s no functionality break.
This phase uses Docker containers for simulating the test environment. It helps to save a lot of time and effort in testing with the help of automation.
4. Continuous Monitoring
As part of the DevOps process, monitoring involves all factors that contribute to the efficiency of the software, where information is tracked and carefully analyzed to discover trends and identify problem areas. In most cases, the monitoring comes with the integration of the operational capabilities of software applications.
It helps to solve various system errors, including server not being reachable, low memory, high bandwidth usage, CPU, etc., 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 gets constant feedback on the application and then explains its strengths and weaknesses to bring further improvements to the software application. 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 detail checking to make sure the code is perfectly used for each server. In this phase, new and updated code is continuously deployed to the server with configuration management tools like SaltStack, Puppet, Chef, etc. Various containerization tools are used in the deployment phase and help in bringing 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 continuity of automation.
In the discussion, it is evident that continuity is the key component of DevOps for eliminating all the steps that distract development, delay detecting issues, and ultimately result in a better product after a long time.
DevOps, allows developers to build any software or application that is more efficient, robust, and scalable and helps in increasing the productivity of your business with 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 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 to speed up product release time with the help of continuous delivery, allowing software developers to quickly solve issues or fix bugs in the early phases through continuous feedback of the applications. 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 allows developers to quickly respond to change requests from user feedback, add or update new features, and customize existing functionality. It results in releasing software products with quicker time to market quickly and more efficiently.
Improved working environment
DevOps follows the best principles and practices that facilitate communication and collaboration across teams to improve the productivity and agility of software development applications.
Developers working on DevOps are significantly proven to be more productive and experts in building quality software in less time. It allows development and operations teams to work together to acquire the best achievable products with good results.
Thus, DevOps is not only a set of practices but a philosophy that streamlines communication across the development and operational team. It mainly focuses on providing altering 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 faster in the market. These tools help to focus more on facilitating collaboration and communication among software developers, operations professionals, and product management. It helps to eliminate context-switching and improve automation and monitoring processes.
While DevOps toolchain contains tools and technology that allow both development and operations teams to communicate and collaborate across the whole DevOps software development lifecycle. It comprises DevOps fundamentals such as 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 utilizes the best practices that you should follow to optimize your development.
Build a collaborative culture: This is a proven DevOps practice used to improve collaboration and communication between development, operations, and other teams.
Use the right tools: DevOps uses the right tools to track performance metrics, display warnings when something goes wrong, or provide complete visibility into the 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 uses continuous delivery to receive the code from continuous integration into the production environment.
Use Agile Development Management: DevOps uses the agile development approach which helps software developers to execute higher-quality products more quickly.
Monitor the right metrics: DevOps practices can help monitor the right metrics to detect when things go wrong so they can be recovered quickly.
Switches to microservices: Microservices are the best fit for the DevOps approach as they help in breaking large and complex projects into smaller pieces.
DevOps adoption: The DevOps culture, methods, and challenges
DevOps adoption allows organizations to significantly adopt DevOps capabilities, tools, and practices to improve the efficiency and productivity of their software product.
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:
DevOps method is a development methodology used to improve work during the entire software development lifecycle. The DevOps process can be visualized as an infinite loop that comprises various phases such as planning, coding, building, testing, releasing, deploying, operating, monitoring, and feedback on the software application.
DevOps Challenges:
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 tools set for Dev and Ops Team.
- Getting all on board.
- Changing organizational culture.
- Adoption of advanced tools.
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 uses various practices covering continuous integration/ continuous delivery (CI/CD), creating microservices, and using infrastructure for code execution. DevSecOps append in vulnerability testing, incident management, and threat modeling.
DevOps’ main objective is to take liability, efficiency, and security of software development to the greatest level of success. In addition to automating processes, DevSecOps is concerned with 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, allowing faster development and quicker release of the software.
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 good decision-making 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 DevOps software and applications development. Our development and operations DevOps team work together across the entire DevOps lifecycle to improve the speed and quality of software deployment. Working with our DevOps teams, you will get high-quality software products with 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. 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 automaton, 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 concerns by consistently performing security checks.
- Identifying root causes and fixing 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.
