Basic Principles of DevOps Methodology

What is DevOps? How did it come into existence? What are its essence and benefits? We will answer all these questions in this article.

Story of Creation

The acronym 'DevOps' comes from the combination of two terms - 'Development' and 'Operations'. This new term came into use after a conference organized by well-known developer Patrick Debois. This conference was attended by many recognized experts: developers, system programmers, and managers.

DevOps offers a brand new way of developing and maintaining software through closer collaboration between developers and system administrators.

Basic principles of DevOps 

DevOps optimizes the execution of many tasks and makes the interaction between development and support as convenient as possible. As a result, both developers and sysadmins are responsible for the final result and have a stake in eliminating problems that arise in the process.

DevOps helps to improve the efficiency of software development and operation, as well as makes it possible to use automation tools profitably.

The basic DevOps working principles are as follows:

1. Automation. Working processes are fully automated. Development, deployment, collection of feedback, and updates are carried out faster.
2. Hastening the date of release. The development process is simplified, and meeting business needs fully becomes easier. The customer gets a working product faster, which increases their competitiveness. Monitoring processes become more sophisticated, and the time needed to establish them is reduced.
3. Improvement of two-way communication. DevOps allows for prompt feedback communication. Thanks to feedback from users, the team can quickly adjust and update the product.
4. Standards and rules. To ensure the effectiveness of DevOps, team members should work according to standards that allow using certain tools. This provides the possibility to automate a number of processes.
5. Continuous testing. Running security tests helps to maintain control over programs and software operation, quickly solving the emerging problems.

Sometimes DevOps is compared to Agile. These two concepts do have similarities; moreover, some principles of DevOps are adopted from Agile. However, the DevOps methodology is broader: it goes beyond development and presupposes deeper knowledge of the processes.

The basic principles adopted from Agile:

1. A culture that makes business interactions more convenient.
2. Pursuance of saving time spent on work, abandonment of ineffective actions, use of methods aimed at improving the quality of work and accelerating processes, and quick fix of problems.
3. Use of numerical indicators and criteria for performance assessment.
4. Exchange of information between departments and mutual responsibility.
5. Automation.

DevOps implementation tools

Previously, sysadmins had to maintain multiple applications at once, which significantly slowed down the work. They had to configure various databases and services, control the load, and deal with security. DevOps has streamlined these processes by standardizing configurations.

Continuous delivery and integration

Continuous integration allows developers to pay more attention to changes in the underlying code. The code is tested automatically, and the applications become more stable.

During continuous delivery, the latest versions are automatically deployed to production. Updates are constant. CI/CD helps to automatically secure codes even before they are deployed.

Version control

Version control systems provide a means for tracking code changes and corrections, make analysis easier and faster, and help to resolve conflicts. All team members can participate in writing and fixing the code, and this won’t lead to confusion. 

Agile development

The methodology helps to establish collaborative work between several teams, receive feedback, and adapt to new software.

Continuous monitoring

Real-time tracking of application performance and working capacity. In this regard, certain telemetry and metadata metrics are automatically collected, and alerts about deviations in the application are configured.

Despite the fact that DevOps methodology has been around for over 10 years, not all managers consider its implementation necessary. In IT companies, DevOps has been a must-have for a long time, but companies from other industries, which develop software exclusively for their own needs, treat this methodology more as an extravagance.

Still, more and more managers are realizing the benefits of DevOps and have started looking for specialists to help with its implementation. Andersen, being one of the DevOps companies, has had situations when clients with whom we had worked on other projects requested DevOps engineers for their own development team. As we observe the increasing demand for specialists in this area, we are actively developing DevOps in our company in order to be able to promptly provide engineers at the customer’s request.