What is DevOps? Lifecycle, Tools, and More

what-is-devops

For many years, the IT industry was following the traditional way of working. As a part of a project, the development and operations teams used to work independently. They hardly interacted while the other team played its part. But, now the world of IT is moving towards the DevOps way of working.

DevOps stands for development and operations. It is the combination of people, processes, and technology to continuously give value to the clients. In this approach both the development and operations work together.

Summary

In this article, you’ll know about DevOps in detail. It is one of the most popular terms in the IT business. Here, we will discuss its usage, culture, advantages, and how it is advancing the current work culture. So, let’s take a deep dive.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a combination of approaches, tools, and a strategy for automating and integrating the processes of software development and IT teams. Team empowerment, cross-team communication and collaboration, and technology automation are all emphasized.

It is one of many approaches used by IT workers to complete IT projects that match business requirements. Agile software development, IT service management frameworks such as ITIL, project management guidelines such as Lean and Six Sigma, and other methodologies can all coexist with DevOps.

Some IT professionals argue that simply combining Dev and Ops is insufficient and that the word DevOps should incorporate business (BizDevOps), security (DevSecOps), and other domains explicitly.

How does DevOps Work?

A DevOps team is made up of developers and IT operations professionals who work together to increase software deployment speed and quality across the product lifecycle. It’s a positive cultural shift, with far-reaching implications for teams and the companies they work for.

In a DevOps architecture, the gap between development and operations teams has been reduced to a great extent. These two teams may occasionally combine to form a single team with engineers who work across the whole application lifecycle — from development and testing to deployment and operations — and have a wide range of skills.

DevOps teams use tools to automate and speed up processes, resulting in increased reliability. A DevOps toolchain assists teams with essential principles, including continuous integration, continuous delivery, automation, and collaboration.

DevOps Lifecycle

The DevOps lifecycle is divided into six phases, each of which represents the procedures, capabilities, and tools required for development (on the left side of the loop) and operations (on the right side of the loop) (on the right side of the loop).

Teams collaborate and communicate throughout each phase to maintain alignment, velocity, and quality. The following is a step-by-step process of the lifecycle:

1) Plan

Agile methods should be adopted by DevOps teams to increase speed and quality. Agile project management and software development is an iterative process that allows teams to break down work into smaller chunks and produce incremental value.

2) Build

Git is a version management system that is both free and open-source. It features numerous unique and strong processes and tools for the development build process due to its great support for branching, merging, and rewriting repository history.

3) Continuous Development and Integration

The design and coding of an application’s software are included at this stage. At this step, work can begin—but only on an ongoing basis, as the following phases will provide feedback and help guide coding and KPIs. Integration begins as soon as development begins.

Continuous integration is an important part of any DevOps lifecycle since it requires developers to often contribute new source code. The new code is designed to detect bugs or issues early in the development process, allowing them to be addressed. The code that enables additional capabilities is then seamlessly integrated with the original code, which is then deployed into systems or applications, where users can interact with it.

4) Continuous Monitoring

In this stage, issues are identified and resolved that affect product uptime, speed, and functionality as quickly as possible. Notify your team of changes, high-risk actions, or failures automatically so you can keep systems running.

5) Operate

This stage involves managing the delivery of IT services to customers from beginning to end. This refers to the procedures for designing, implementing, configuring, deploying, and maintaining all IT infrastructure that underpins an organization’s services.

6) Continuous Feedback

Each release should be evaluated by the teams, who should then provide reports in order to enhance future releases. Teams may enhance their processes and incorporate customer feedback into the next release by collecting continuous feedback.

DevOps Tools

The essential phases of the DevOps lifecycle are addressed by DevOps tools. They help to increase communication, eliminate context switching, add automation, and provide observability and monitoring in DevOps methods.

DevOps toolchains often take one of two approaches: all-in-one or open. An all-in-one toolchain provides a full solution that doesn’t normally integrate with other third-party tools, whereas an open toolchain allows for customization using various tools.

DevOps Culture

While DevOps approaches use technology to automate and optimize operations, it all starts with the culture within the organization—and the people who contribute to it. The challenge of building such a culture is that it necessitates significant shifts in how people work and cooperate.

Organizations that embrace a DevOps culture, on the other hand, can foster the growth of high-performing teams. At its foundation, the DevOps culture promotes closer collaboration and shared ownership of the products that development and operations teams create and manage. This allows businesses to better align their people, processes, and tools to focus on the consumer.

Benefits

In this section, we will see some of the advantages of DevOps that made companies adopt DevOps:

  • End-to-end accountability is supported.
  • Simplified development processes as a result of increasing development responsibility and code ownership.
  • Fewer silos and improved communication among IT departments.
  • Provides faster time to market the software.
  • Quick improvement is there since continuous feedback is provided by the customers.
  • Through builds, validations, and deployment, the entire software delivery pipeline is improved.

Disadvantages

Everything comes with merits and demerits, and DevOps is no exception. These are some disadvantages that one can expect while following the popular software development practice:

  • Tools, platforms, training, and support needed to use DevOps effectively are expensive.
  • Automation added can be unnecessary, unstable, or dangerous.
  • Developing cooperation and partnership between customers and vendors takes time. It’s impossible to build a strong bond with someone overnight.
  • DevOps necessitates communication and teamwork. Only then will it be able to provide the desired value. Because the outsourcing labor comes from varied backgrounds and must cooperate in your work culture, the results may not be as realistic as expected.

Conclusion

In this blog, we learned the basics of DevOps, its culture, lifecycle, how it works, and its advantages and disadvantages. In conclusion, DevOps is vital not only for speeding up software development but also for improving software quality. DevOps brings a fresh attitude, agile techniques, and smart technologies to the table, all of which work together to achieve that aim.

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