What is DevOps and why do we need it?

What is DevOps?

As the name suggests, DevOps is the combination of development and operations related to software engineering that is aimed at unifying software development (Dev) and software operations (Ops). DevOps combines the procedures followed by a team of development and operations engineers who work together in the complete service lifecycle.

This helps to increase the ability of an organization to deliver its services at a rapid pace. Besides, DevOps helps to consistently improve the products and services of the organization at a much quicker speed in comparison to the organizations that follow traditional software development and infrastructure management. Thus organizations following Development and Operations can better serve their customers and present an enviable competition in the market. Some other benefits include reliability, scale, improved collaboration, and security.

To be more clear, DevOps should not be misunderstood as a software or a tool, it can better be understood as a software culture meant for a perpetual improvement. It helps the Development engineers and operation engineers to work together from a single platform and bring in amazing results. At times, the quality assurance and security teams are also closely integrated with the development and operations team, throughout the application lifecycle. Its cycle consists of five different phases. They are as follows:

1. Continuous Development: This is the planning, coding, and development phase. Finalization of a list of achievable objectives to be delivered by the proposed application is followed by code generation and the total project development. DevOps give you the absolute freedom of language to write the code. All the developed versions are maintained in a central repository for an easy access to all the team members later if required.

2. Continuous Testing: Testing ensures the developed application can perform as expected in a live environment. The findings and the different perspectives of the application are sent back to the development phase for the betterment of the application. Tools like Selenium, TestNG, JUnit/NUnit are used to automate the testing process. These tools are continuously used after the development of the application leads to the ‘Continuous Testing’ phase in the DevOps lifecycle.

3. Continuous Integration: The phase ensures a comprehensive integration of the complete process for a seamless performance. Continuous integration ensures a smooth movement to the next phase effectively. The most commonly used Continuous Integration tool is Jenkins. The tools Bamboo and Hudson are also very much preferred.

4. Continuous Deployment: Configuration Management tools or Containerization tools help for a continuous deployment of the developed application. Configuration management tools are used to ensure a consistent performance whereas the Containerization tools are used to maintain the consistency. The popular Configuration Management tools and Containerization tools are Puppet, Chef, Ansible, SaltStack, and Docker respectively.

5. Continuous Monitoring: Here, the critical information regarding the functioning of the application is recorded and carefully analyzed to recognize the problematic areas. This can easily find out the bugs which were missed out during the testing phase. The commonly used monitoring tools include Splunk, ELK Stack, Nagios, Sensu, NewRelic.

Why do we need DevOps?

A short description of the advantages and benefits were stated earlier. To be more clear about it, surveys have shown that many of the companies performing extraordinarily well, make use of DevOps to deliver an internationally competent stability, reliability, as well as security. To be simple, a mutual working environment can lead to a rapid flow of the planned work. In a collaborative environment, Development and Operations can efficiently settle the challenges faced by the Development team and Operations team individually. It helps for a better management of resources and to alleviate the bugs rapidly at any stages of development. Human errors are almost nullified as the process is based on frequent iterations. DevOps also ensures a stable environment for operations. Customers receive new features and updated more often and the outrages can be fixed rapidly, sometimes with a single restart, that the company can stay invariably competent.

With all the above benefits, DevOps is gaining much popularity in the industry. It is not only limited to development and IT operations, but also the methodology is spread to QAs, PMs, and Security experts for a comprehensive result. Change yourself from a good company to a great one with Development and Operations.