A business can produce applications and services more quickly than with traditional software development processes by implementing DevOps, a portmanteau of “development” and “operations.” Organizations are able to compete more successfully in the market and provide better customer service thanks to this speed. DevOps, to put it simply, is about breaking down the boundaries that have historically existed between development and operations teams. Development and operations teams collaborate across the whole software application life cycle, from development and testing to deployment and operations, when using a DevOps paradigm.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a dynamic structure and concept that promotes better, faster application development as well as quicker customer deployment of updated or new software features. Application development teams (Dev) and their IT operations team (Ops) counterparts benefit from easier, more frequent communication, cooperation, integration, visibility, and transparency when using the DevOps methodology.
Every stage of the DevOps lifecycle is affected by this closer bond between from the earliest software design stages to the phases of coding, building, testing, and release, and continuing through deployment, operations, and continuous monitoring. The ongoing consumer feedback cycle that drives creation, testing, deployment, and further improvement is fueled by this relationship. One outcome of these initiatives may be the more frequent and timely provision of essential feature updates or enhancements.
DevOps objectives are sometimes divided into four categories: DevOps tools and the concepts of culture, automation, measurement, and sharing (CAMS) might help in these areas. Through the automation of hitherto laborious, manual, or static tasks related to integration, development, testing, deployment, or monitoring, these technologies can improve the efficiency and collaboration of workflows in development and operations.
Why Does DevOps Matter?
DevOps prioritizes customer happiness and faster value delivery in addition to removing obstacles to communication and collaboration between IT operations and development teams. Continuous process improvement and business innovation are two more goals that DevOps aims to achieve.
DevOps promotes an organization’s end customers to receive business value more quickly, better, and securely. Features, updates, or new product releases more frequently could be examples of this value. It may have to do with how soon a new feature or product is released to the public while maintaining the appropriate standards of quality and security. Alternatively, it could concentrate on how rapidly a problem or error is found, fixed, and re-released.
The infrastructure underneath provides DevOps with smooth software performance, availability, and dependability while it is produced, tested, and then put into production.
Methods DevOps
Organizations can employ a few popular DevOps techniques to enhance and expedite product releases and development. They manifest as techniques and methodologies for software development. The most well-liked ones are Agile, Kanban, and Scrum:
Agile:
Scrum outlines how team members should collaborate to move development and quality assurance projects along more quickly. Key processes and jargon (sprints, time boxes, daily scrum [meeting]), as well as roles (Scrum Master, product owner), are all part of scrum techniques.
Kaban:
Toyota’s factory floor efficiencies gave rise to the Kanban system. Work in progress (WIP) for software projects must be recorded on a Kanban board, according to Kanban protocol.
Fluid:
DevOps procedures and tools are still greatly influenced by previous iterations of agile software development methodologies. Several DevOps techniques and Agile programming are included in processes like Scrum and Kanban. Agile methodologies are linked to enhanced adaptability to evolving demands and specifications, requirement mapping as user stories, daily standups, and ongoing customer feedback. Agile also recommends abbreviated software development lifecycles as an alternative to protracted, conventional “waterfall” development techniques.
DevOps Network
DevOps practitioners frequently include a few DevOps-friendly tools in their DevOps “toolchain.” These solutions aim to further automate, expedite, and streamline the different steps in the software delivery workflow, or “pipeline.” The fundamental DevOps principles of automation, cooperation, and integration between development and operations teams are also promoted by a number of these technologies. A selection of tools used at different stages of the DevOps lifecycle is displayed below.
Organize:
This stage aids in defining the needs and values of the business. Jira and Git are two examples of software that can be used for project management and tracking known issues.
Code:
Software design and code creation are part of this phase. Some examples of tools are Bitbucket, GitHub, GitLab, and Stash.
Create:
During this stage, you oversee software versions and builds, and Code compilation and packaging can be aided by the use of automated tools before a release into production. You use package or source code repositories that “package” the infrastructure required for a product’s distribution. A few examples of tools are Gradle, Maven, Chef, Ansible, Docker, and JFrog Artifactory.
Examine:
Continuous testing, either automated or human, is part of this phase to guarantee the best possible code quality. JUnit, Codeception, Selenium, Vagrant, TestNG, or BlazeMeter are a few examples of tools.
Set up:
Tools for managing, coordinating, scheduling, and automating product releases into production may be included in this phase. Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Jenkins, Kubernetes, OpenShift, OpenStack, Docker, and Jira are a few examples of tools.
Perform:
Software is managed throughout this step of production. Ansible, Puppet, PowerShell, Chef, Salt, or Otter are a few examples of tools.
Observe:
During this stage, faults are identified and data is gathered from a specific release of software that is in use. Slack, Datadog, Grafana, Wireshark, Splunk, Nagios, and New Relic are a few examples of tools.
DevOps Practices
The concepts of automation and continual improvement are reflected in DevOps approaches. Many methods concentrate on one or more stages of the development cycle. Among these techniques are:
Ongoing improvement:
This procedure covers the DevOps lifecycle’s planning and coding stages. Version control systems could be used.
Ongoing examination:
As application code is being created or modified, this procedure includes automated, planned, continuous code tests. Tests of this kind help expedite the release of code to production.
Integration that is ongoing (CI):
By using configuration management (CM) tools in conjunction with other test and development tools, this technique keeps track of the percentage of code that is ready for production during development. In order to find and fix code problems as soon as possible, testing and development must provide speedy feedback.
Constant provision:
This procedure streamlines the distribution of code and is moved to a pre-production or staging environment following testing. After that, a staff member may choose to push these code modifications into production.
Deployment that is ongoing (CD):
This approach automates the release of new or modified code into production, much like continuous delivery does. A continuous deployment organization may release new features or code multiple times a day. By preserving code consistency across many deployment platforms and environments, container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes can provide continuous deployment.
Ongoing observation:
This procedure entails continuous observation of the code that is running as well as the supporting infrastructure. a feedback loop that loops back to development after reporting defects or other problems.
Code-based infrastructure:
That Practice can be used to automate the provisioning of infrastructure needed for a software release at different stages of the DevOps process. Developers use their current development tools to add “code” for infrastructure. Developers might use OpenShift, Kubernetes, or Docker to generate a storage volume on demand, for instance. Operations teams can monitor environment setups, track changes, and streamline configuration rollbacks with this technique.
Benefits OF DevOps
Advocates of DevOps highlight a number of technological and financial advantages, many of which can lead to satisfied clients. Among the advantages of DevOps are:
- improved and quicker product delivery
- quicker problem-solving and less complexity
- Improved availability and scalability
- more steady conditions for operation
- improved use of resources
- Increasing automation
- Increased understanding of system results
- Increased creativity
History Of DevOps
Agile software development and lean programming are early foundations of many DevOps techniques for optimizing software development and deployment. However, DevOps began as a series of grassroots initiatives aimed at coordinating the work of operations team members and developers. In the early 2000s, it became necessary to protect well-known websites like Google and Flickr against heavy traffic. Software reliability engineers (SREs), operations specialists who collaborate closely with developers to guarantee that the websites will continue to function even after code is published into production, were brought in due to this necessity. Engineers John Allspaw and Paul Hammond of Flickr gave a conference presentation in 2009 on their own DevOps-like methodology. The title of their presentation was “Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr: 10+ Deploys per Day.” In the same year, Debois Patrick arranged Belgium’s first “DevOps Day.” As more DevOps Days were celebrated globally, a hashtag for the event was also included and grew in popularity. To advance the objectives of DevOps, industry and open-source technologies and frameworks were created and put out in the ensuing years.
DevOps and Netapp
With DevOps, NetApp facilitates improved business outcomes by enabling operations teams to provide automated infrastructure with fewer engineering resources and by enabling developers to work in stable, predictable settings with reduced friction. In both on-premises and cloud environments, you can dependably provide your company with the services and capabilities it needs to improve developer productivity thanks to NetApp® technology.
Using well-known tools in the DevOps pipeline, NetApp enables developers, testing, QA, and operations teams to easily consume infrastructure resources (such as persistent storage volumes) as code. Examples include IAC integrations with technologies like Puppet, Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, and NetApp storage APIs.However, NetApp offers more to developers than merely making storage as code consumption simple. Additionally, NetApp technology enables operations to provision with confidence. and provide resources to the testing and development staff. When quick, time-saving storage solutions like snapshots or clones self-provision, developers and testers can then expedite the development and test cycles. These features expedite the development and quality assurance processes by enabling copies of real-time production data or code sets to be supplied as code in a matter of seconds or minutes. Find out more about NetApp’s DevOps-focused design.
Conclusion
Development and Operations are combined to form “DevOps.” In order to offer business value to consumers more rapidly and reliably, it represents a shift away from the previous siloed model and toward integrated, holistic teams that work on development, IT, and operations as one unit, each taking into consideration the demands and requirements of the others.
As a result of communication and collaboration between developers and operations to facilitate the quick deployment of software, DevOps approaches are becoming more widely used. To comprehend how their code impacts infrastructure and to gain access to production systems for monitoring and troubleshooting, developers collaborate with operations. In a similar vein, Operations and Developers are collaborating to build dependable, automated, self-service tools and infrastructure. All of this while guaranteeing the security of the software’s binary building components as they operate. a CI/CD workflow that is entirely automated.
