What is Devops?

The word DevOps is a combination of the terms development and operations, it is meant to represent a collaborative or shared approach to the tasks performed by a organisation application development and IT operations teams.

While DevOps is not a technology it adopts cultural philosophies, practices, and tools. DevOps environments generally have common methodologies, these include the following:

• The acronym CI/CD refers to two separate concepts that are generally used together: continuous integration and continuous delivery tools, with an emphasis on task automation.

• Products that support DevOps adoption include, real-time monitoring incident management systems, configuration management and collaboration platforms.

• Cloud computing services such as microservices and containers can be implemented using DevOps methodologies.

How does DevOps work?

DevOps is a methodology meant to improve work throughout the software development lifecycle and can also be used to build infrastructure in the cloud using infrastructure as Code (IaC) for e.g. Azure ARM Templates or Terraform.

You can visualise a DevOps process as an infinite loop, comprising of these steps: plan, code, build, test, release, deploy, operate, monitor. Therefore DevOps means that an development or IT operations team writes software that perfectly meets organisation requirements, deploys without any wasted time and runs optimally on the first try. Organizations use a combination of culture and technology to pursue this goal.

In some DevOps models and practices, security and quality assurance teams may also work closely together with development and operations and throughout the application lifecycle. When security becomes one of the main focuses of everyone on a DevOps team, this is sometimes referred to as DevSecOps.

There are a few key practices that help organizations innovate faster through the use of automation and streamlining the software development and infrastructure management processes. Most of these practices are accomplished with proper tooling such as Azure DevOps.

One fundamental practice in DevOps is to perform very frequent but small code updates. This is how organizations innovate faster for their customers. These updates are usually more incremental in nature than the occasional large updates performed under traditional release practices.

Frequent but small updates help make each software or infrastructure deployment less risky. They help internal teams address bugs faster because teams can identify the last deployment that caused the error thus able to roll back to previous state. Although the size of updates will vary, organizations using a DevOps model deploy updates much more often than organizations using traditional software development practices.

What problems can DevOps solve?

Every company faces its own challenges some of these common problems include releases that take too long, manual processes, lengthy reviews, software that doesn't meet expectations and IT that limits business growth. DevOps allows technical teams to do more, do it better, and do it faster. DevOps projects can moves from initial requirements to live software faster, shorter cycle times can keep requirements from shifting so that the product delivers what your organisation want.

DevOps solves communication and priority problems between IT departments. To build viable software, development teams must understand the production environment and test their code in realistic conditions. In a traditional IT structure development and operations teams would normally work in silos. This would often mean that developers are satisfied when their code delivers functionality and if there were release break due to Infrastructure problem in production, it was up to the operations team to make the fixes. Therefore DevOps brings together the development and operations teams which helps drives efficiencies and can improve collaboration of development and operations teams.

With a faster process from idea to live software, technical teams can capitalize on market opportunities, where DevOps provides a competitive advantage for businesses.

Devops Benefits include the following:

• Fewer silos and increased communications between IT teams (such as Development and Operations)

• Improved calibration

• Faster time to market for software and cloud infrastructure

• Rapid delivery and improvement based on feedback

• Less downtime

• Repeatable deployment using code

• Improvement to the whole software delivery pipeline through builds, validations and deployment

• Less manual work due to automation

• Streamlined development processes through increased responsibility and code ownership in development

• Security

• Broader roles and skills.

Summary

The DevOps model relies on effective tooling to help development operation and Security teams rapidly and reliably deploy and innovate for their organisations and customers. These tools automate manual tasks, help teams manage complex environments at scale, and keep engineers, consultants and architects in control of the cloud environment that is enabled by DevOps.