DevOps
DevOps is a set of practices, tools, and a cultural philosophy that automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams. It emphasizes team empowerment, cross-team communication and collaboration, and technology automation.
The DevOps movement began around 2007 when the software development and IT operations communities raised concerns about the traditional software development model, where developers who wrote code worked apart from operations who deployed and supported the code. The term DevOps, a combination of the words development and operations, reflects the process of integrating these disciplines into one, continuous process.
How does DevOps work?
A DevOps team includes developers and IT operations working collaboratively throughout the product lifecycle, in order to increase the speed and quality of software deployment. It’s a new way of working, a cultural shift, that has significant implications for teams and the organizations they work for.
Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams are no longer “siloed.” Sometimes, these two teams merge into a single team where the engineers work across the entire application lifecycle — from development and test to deployment and operations — and have a range of multidisciplinary skills.
DevOps teams use tools to automate and accelerate processes, which helps to increase reliability. A DevOps toolchain helps teams tackle important DevOps fundamentals including continuous integration, continuous delivery, automation, and collaboration.
DevOps values are sometimes applied to teams other than development. When security teams adopt a DevOps approach, security is an active and integrated part of the development process. This is called DevSecOps.
The DevOps lifecycle
Because of the continuous nature of DevOps, practitioners use the infinity loop to show how the phases of the DevOps lifecycle relate to each other. Despite appearing to flow sequentially, the loop symbolizes the need for constant collaboration and iterative improvement throughout the entire lifecycle.
The DevOps lifecycle consists of eight phases representing the processes, capabilities, and tools needed for development (on the left side of the loop) and operations (on the right side of the loop). Throughout each phase, teams collaborate and communicate to maintain alignment, velocity, and quality.
Discover
Building software is a team sport. In preparation for the upcoming sprint, teams must workshop to explore, organize, and prioritize ideas. Ideas must align to strategic goals and deliver customer impact. Agile can help guide DevOps teams.
Plan
DevOps teams should adopt agile practices to improve speed and quality. Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams break work into smaller pieces to deliver incremental value.
Build
Git is a free and open source version control system. It offers excellent support for branching, merging, and rewriting repository history, which has led to many innovative and powerful workflows and tools for the development build process.
Test
Continuous integration (CI) allows multiple developers to contribute to a single shared repository. When code changes are merged, automated tests are run to ensure correctness before integration. Merging and testing code often help development teams gain reassurance in the quality and predictability of code once deployed.
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Deploy
Continuous deployment (CD) allows teams to release features frequently into production in an automated fashion. Teams also have the option to deploy with feature flags, delivering new code to users steadily and methodically rather than all at once. This approach improves velocity, productivity, and sustainability of software development teams.
Operate
Manage the end-to-end delivery of IT services to customers. This includes the practices involved in design, implementation, configuration, deployment, and maintenance of all IT infrastructure that supports an organization’s services.
Observe
Quickly identify and resolve issues that impact product uptime, speed, and functionality. Automatically notify your team of changes, high-risk actions, or failures, so you can keep services on.
Continuous feedback
DevOps teams should evaluate each release and generate reports to improve future releases. By gathering continuous feedback, teams can improve their processes and incorporate customer feedback to improve the next release.
What are the benefits of DevOps?
In Atlassian’s 2020 DevOps Trends survey, 99 percent of respondents said that DevOps had a positive impact on their organization. The benefits of DevOps include faster and easier releases, team efficiency, increased security, higher quality products, and consequently happier teams and customers.
Teams that practice DevOps release deliverables more frequently, with higher quality and stability. In fact, the DORA 2019 State of DevOps report found that elite teams deploy 208 times more frequently and 106 times faster than low-performing teams. Continuous delivery allows teams to build, test, and deliver software with automated tools.
The foundation of DevOps is a culture of collaboration between developers and operations teams, who share responsibilities and combine work. This makes teams more efficient and saves time related to work handoffs and creating code that is designed for the environment where it runs.
By increasing the frequency and velocity of releases, DevOps teams improve products rapidly. A competitive advantage can be gained by quickly releasing new features and repairing bugs.
Practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery ensure changes are functional and safe, which improves the quality of a software product. Monitoring helps teams keep informed of performance in real-time.
By integrating security into a continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment pipeline, DevSecOps is an active, integrated part of the development process. Security is built into the product by integrating active security audits and security testing into agile development and DevOps workflows.