DevOps made easy

When I started to think about a new topic for a blog, I realised DevOps might be a good one, although it’s a pretty common methodology at this moment, however, when I get into the conversation in many meetings and interviews, I feel people aren’t quite aware of very basic and so it will be worth to put it together in simple words.

So, what is DevOps?

The simple answer is – “Its’ just another methodology for software development life cycle”.

We had a waterfall approach and many big-size organizations with huge enterprise applications/platforms are still following the same approach. Then we moved to agile and could achieve faster and shorter delivery. It helped us in reducing time to market and provided many other benefits. This was achieved by bringing business, development, and testing teams together, but Operations was still working in an isolated way following their processes, configuration, environments, etc. And we were always used to getting issues like code is working in a dev or test environment but not working for operations team say in the pre-prod environment. Which usually impacts deployment timelines.

In DevOps, this problem is resolved by bringing development and operations together. This is done by making a centralised way for working which brings development and operations under the same umbrella.

So how do we achieve DevOps?

There is a term CI-CD which is used regularly and is the backbone of DevOps methodology. Some people call it CI-CD – “Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment”, I agree with many other experts that there should always be Continuous Delivery in between. So “Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment”

Usually, organizations implement the first two but avoid continuous deployment. And to be honest it’s not recommended either as it is always better to perform a few more checks and be 100% sure before putting changes in production.?

Tooling –

There is some brilliant tool available to support CI-CD needs, and in the world of open-source many are free.

Image Credit – Source Unknown

The above diagram is for reference which gives some information on famous tools across different stages. e.g. Jenkins is an automation tool that helps in automation for the build, testing, and deployment. This is the most famous tool which facilitates CI and CD but there are some other tools also, we have used AWS code pipeline for other projects as well. Similarly, AWS is given as a cloud platform, but you can pick azure, GCP, or any other as per your need. I would like to write more about tooling separately, as it’s a very interesting topic altogether.

I hope this small write-up gives you some meaningful information without having many technical details involved. Looking forward to having some feedback so I can improve it for the next time.

Thank you.