What is DevOps?

If you aren’t knee-deep in the world of IT or software development, the term DevOps might have snuck up on you, and now you hear it everywhere. So while the term is used heavily in tech circles, it can be a mystery on what it means outside of tech—and how it benefits you, your business, and your customers.

Mixing 3 Critical Roles

DevOps is the mixture of three basic disciplines and roles. The first is your software engineering group, or development team. These are the individuals that are building the software necessary to run your business. The second is your quality assurance or QA team. These critical members of team ensure that the software that is being built meets the needs of the users and that it runs without critical issues that can put your business at risk. Finally, the last is your IT operations team. This third team is responsible for the infrastructure that your business software needs to run on. This includes the databases, network, security, and anything technology oriented that needs to be in place to keep the system running, scale to demand, and be efficient.

DevOps is based on an agile methodology where software, quality testing and infrastructure are continually evolving, maturing and responding to demands of the business and users. But there is a difference between agile and DevOps. Agile is a paradigm for software development; it is a philosophy on how teams work with agility to build software. DevOps represents the organizational change in culture that a company puts in place to transform how they work.

With software always changing, the way that developers, QA engineers, and IT professionals need to work has to change to adapt. New features are added to business software at an ongoing basis, requiring that new features be continuously integrated into the existing software without requiring any downtime of the existing software platform. Docker, Jenkins, Puppet, and other technologies are all part of the DevOps toolset that support continuous integration of new features and maximize the efficiency of the platform with no downtime that can impact your business.

Examples of DevOps Tools

Docker takes software and creates containers for them. These containers allow software to be integrated on different platforms and cloud infrastructures. This allows developers and testers to do their work, and give IT professionals more flexibility in how they can support and integrate ongoing development.

Jenkins allows a system where all of the software that developers have identified as deployable is merged together at a regular cadence each day. This is intended to identify if there are any merging and integration issues so they can be immediately addressed at an ongoing basis instead of waiting until the end and potentially dealing with huge integration problems.

Puppet is technology that allows developers and IT professionals to declaratively program and configure a server, cloud, or computer environment. This automates the configuration of things like operating systems, server software, and network configurations to deploy automatically with new software or for new environments.

DevOps and Your Business

Even if you aren’t involved in IT or software development, it is important to know about DevOps, because it is what can power your business. That is because DevOps applies to multiple types of software products. It includes software that is used internally to run and operate your business, as well as external software that your customers use.

DevOps isn’t just a buzzword, it is how you adapt and structure your business to deliver value to your customers, and streamline how your team supports your business.