It is safe to say that a lot of developers from around have turned their back toward understanding the business value of DevOps. Besides, they have also moved away from figuring out the most feasible and viable way to implement it. Although it is easier to define what DevOps is, it is hard to implement the same, and there are plenty of reasons for that.
One of the reasons for this is that the number of problems domains distinguish vastly from one domain to the other. The different types of tools and processes along with DevOps skills that operations professionals and developers can apply also vary to a great extent. For instance, the centralization of release management processes has a negative impact on the success of DevOps.
Although it is promising to see new and more refined practices emerge, it will only benefit if enterprise DevOps shops follow them. Some of these best practices thwart the basic principles and go beyond common sense. These primarily aim to understand why DevOps is important for your business and how you can implement it correctly the first time. For a lot of companies, this is new and unchartered territory.
In this article, we will understand what DevOps is, what DevOps technologies are, and the best practices. Without further ado, let’s begin.
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What is DevOps and what are DevOps technologies?
DevOps can be described as a set of guidelines or a framework that facilitates and promotes faster and more efficient application development. In addition, it also focuses on the rollout of new and improved software features to customers.
DevOps practices, if implemented correctly, primarily ensure smoother communication, seamless team collaboration, visibility, and transparency between the IT operations team and the application development team.
This closer relationship between the two teams should essentially be visible at each phase of the DevOps cycle. Right from the initial software planning to develop, code, test, and launch to operations, deployment, monitoring, and so on.
This close relationship between the two creates a clear path for a consistent and accurate customer feedback loop which helps in improving, testing, and deployment of new and improved products.
Some experts in the industry have categorized DevOps objectives into four main categories. These include automation, culture, sharing, and automation. DevOps tools or solutions can help in all of these areas by streamlining operations and development workflows. Besides, these tools also automate the manual, time-consuming, manual, and static activities that are involved in the development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and integration.
Importance of DevOps
Apart from clearing out the collaboration and communication hurdles between the IT operations and development team, one of the core values of DevOps is customer satisfaction.
In fact, DevOps is also designed to accelerate business innovation and steer the wheel of consistent process improvement. The best practices of DevOps lay a solid foundation for better, more efficient, secured, and faster delivery of business value to a company’s customers.
These values could be anything and greet us as new features, updates, and product launches. It could also be how soon a product is released and how fast customers can get their hands on it. Or the other possibility could be how swiftly a particular issue or bug was identified and solved.
DevOps is important and that is why its underlying infrastructure is important to support the performance, reliability, and availability of software.
DevOps practices and their impact on DevOps technologies
Most of the DevOps practices focus on consistent automation and improvement. Similarly, almost all practices focus on more than one development cycle phase.
Some of these practices include:
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Consistent testing
This process encompasses pre-scheduled, automated, and continuous code tests as application code tests are being updated. These tests play an important role in accelerating the development and delivery of code to production.
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Consistent development
This practice primarily focuses on the coding and planning phase of the entire DevOps lifecycle. Here, version-control mechanisms could come into play.
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Continuous delivery
This specific practice automates the delivery of code changes, post-testing, to a staging environment. At this stage, a staff member could decide to push such code changes into production.
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Continuous integration
With this practice, configuration management (CM) platforms come together with other development and testing solutions to assess how much of the developed code can be sent to production.
This could involve rapid feedback between development and testing to determine and address code-related issues.
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Continuous deployment
Just like continuous delivery, this particular practice automates the release of changed or new codes to production. A company that is involved in continuous deployment could be rolling out new features and code multiple times in a single day.
Container technologies including Kubernetes and Docker can play a key role in facilitating continuous deployment. This is done by ensuring there is consistency and quality of codes across various deployment environments and platforms.
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Consistent monitoring
This practice caters to the monitoring of the code in operation and the infrastructure that is supporting it. A feedback loop reports on issues and bugs that are sent back to the development team.
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Infrastructure as code
This practice can be utilized at multiple DevOps phases to automate the provisioning of infrastructure that is essential for software to be rolled out. The developers add the infrastructure “code” from the existing development tools.
For instance, it is safe to assume that developers create storage volume on-demand from OpenShift, Kubernetes, and Docker.
This practice predominantly enables operations teams to assess track changes, environment configurations, simplify rollback of new features, and more.
Simplifying DevOps technologies
Choosing the best tools for DevOps can be challenging. Besides, these solutions are not within the familiar territories of most enterprise development shops. However, if you are clear about your DevOps objectives and follow the best DevOps practices, you should be able to manage well.
Think about the changes your enterprise will make over the upcoming years and be ready to evaluate the tooling side of it. Creating a laboratory to try and test new tools is a good idea to do DevOps in a better way.
Without question, DevOps operations will go on for many years to come. This is why it is important to incorporate DevOps practices into tool choices and business plans.
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