The five C’s of DevOps

As a software development or IT company, how do you want to see your company’s innovation road map? How to consistently release great software, achieve a high level of automation and decrease development cycles, while steadily maintaining high-performing teams? In today’s dynamically changing landscape, adopting DevOps practices has become the need of the hour for the enterprises. According to the 2017 State of DevOps Report, the percentage of people working on DevOps is increasing with each passing year. In 2017, the amount of people working in DevOps teams is 27% as compared to 16% in 2014

An approach that brings together development and operations teams in an organization, reducing the silo way of working and fostering collaboration — this methodology is known as DevOps. By embracing DevOps, organizations can see a shift in their innovation and productivity pace.

DevOps minimizes downtime, automates software release cycle, improves software quality, and feedback process. As organizations start adopting DevOps, use of automation tools and approaches inevitably becomes an integral part of the culture. In the present day, automation is the key, which is very much infused with DevOps or vice-versa. Right from planning, coding to testing to deployment and maintenance, DevOps automates the entire process.

Let’s find out the 5 Cs of DevOps:

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration is a practice employed in software development. When your team has to do multiple merges a day into a shared repository, every merge is checked through an automated verification system – an automated build and automated tests. It is a process to ensure that any changes introduced into the code base are built, tested and reported in case of any issues as fast as possible.

Through Continuous Integration, rapid feedback can be given to any defect introduced to the code base.

Continuous Integration helps in:

·        Detecting defects quickly

·        Identifying those small changes that led to the defect 

·        Automatic testing and test coverage

Some of the open source CI tools are Jenkins, GoCD, CruiseControl. 

Continuous Testing

This is an end-to-end automated testing practice, integrating QA into your existing development process. Continuous Testing will help detect regression error early in the software development life cycle. As per the study conducted by IBM, it says that “The cost to fix an error found after product release was four to five times as much as one uncovered during design, and up to 100 times more than one identified in the maintenance phase.” Integrating a complete automated Continuous Testing process into the SDLC can help in getting early feedback on the quality of software. FitNesse, Gatling, Cucumber.js, Jasmine, Mocha are some of the open source tools while Selenium, Cucumber, JUnit, JMeter are the popular tools.

Continuous Delivery

Continuous Delivery is a software development practice which refers to the ability of delivering software into production at any time. Through Continuous Delivery, one can quickly deploy to production in a repeatable manner. If your software is deployable at any time throughout the life cycle, then it is called Continuous Delivery. Continuous Delivery allows you to deliver software with confidence and increases the velocity of releases.

XebiaLabs’ XLDeploy is one of the premier deployment automation tools.

Continuous Deployment

Continuous Deployment is one step ahead of Continuous Delivery. This means deploying code to production as soon as it is ready. Without Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, one cannot achieve Continuous Deployment. While a certain organization may or may not opt for Continuous Deployment, Continuous Delivery is a vital part of the DevOps practice.

The Continuous Deployment approach integrates teams and processes in a single pipeline, make deployments smooth without any lag in security. By implementing Continuous Deployment, problems can be detected early and fixed quickly.

Continuous Monitoring

It is crucial to continuously monitor applications and infrastructure to receive feedback on how those applications are behaving in a production environment. In DevOps world, there is a saying, “If it isn’t monitored, it isn’t production!” Effective monitoring is key to successful DevOps implementation. It enables us to take corrective measures in case things go haywire.

Tools like Nagios, Zabbix are widely used open source monitoring tools.

Know more about the DevOps fundamental training and how it can help you with core DevOps topics.