By the end of this article you’ll get a general idea behind DevOps approach. I will describe the DevOps.
To make things clear — DevOps is a methodology. The idea of this methodology is to create a new mindset. A mindset when developers and operations combine their efforts to achieve a common goal.
By implementing DevOps practices, organizations can accelerate their software development processes, improve collaboration, deliver more reliable software, and ultimately provide better value to their customers. It has become a widely adopted approach in the software industry, driving innovation and efficiency in the development and deployment of software products.
Traditionally, or say 10 years ago, the development team could be roughly divided into developers — people who knew how to write code, and operations. For those who still wonder — who on earth are those operations:
They are administrators — sysadmins, network admins, database admins, and all other people who know the infrastructure.
So… The operations were interested in keeping things stable to minimize the chance of software conflicts. While developers mostly cared about new features, new versions, and well, yes bug fixes. The main problem with all the above was the lack of cooperation and communication. As a result, the software couldn’t be delivered at a desired fast pace.
Now, take developers and operations, merge them into a single team, and drive them with the idea of mutual support. You get DevOps.
DevOps methodology allows delivering software frequently with minor iterable changes.
- Faster Time-to-Market: DevOps emphasizes automation and continuous integration and deployment, which significantly reduce the time it takes to develop, test, and release software. This enables organizations to deliver new features and updates to customers faster, gaining a competitive edge in the market.
- Continuous Delivery and Deployment: With DevOps, organizations can achieve continuous delivery and deployment, allowing for smaller, more frequent releases. This results in a more agile development process and quicker responses to customer feedback and market demands.
- Increased Collaboration: DevOps promotes a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility between development, operations, and other teams. This improved collaboration leads to better communication, problem-solving, and innovation.
- Higher Quality Software: Continuous testing and automation in DevOps ensure that code changes are thoroughly tested before deployment. This reduces the chances of defects and errors in the production environment, resulting in higher quality software.
- Improved Stability and Reliability: DevOps practices focus on monitoring and feedback, allowing teams to detect and address issues in real-time. This leads to more stable and reliable systems, with faster recovery from failures.
Except for the cultural component DevOps methodology became possible thanks to the following approaches:
- Infrastructure as code?is an approach when servers can be configured automatically. The idea here is to imagine your server infrastructure more like an abstract concept. It’s easy enough as a lot of today’s servers are cloud-based. Next step is to simply describe the configuration of your servers in a configuration file. The benefits here are the following: you can configure any number of servers really fast, all the configurations are documented with the same code.
- Microservice?architecture is an approach in software development when the application is divided into loosely coupled parts. Imagine you have a modern social media messaging app with chats, stories, voice calls, bots and so on. All these can be developed like independent mini applications. This approach makes it easier to maintain, test, and reuse parts of the application. On the other hand, the development process becomes more complicated because code consists of more parts. Developers should think of communication between services within applications.
- DevOps loves?automation. Automation is demanded by modern insanely fast operating software development industry. Dozens of continuously integrated builds are queued for a deployment….daily. There is no way you can manually test them all. Same applies to server configuration.
- DevOps utilize the arsenal of?tools. Most of DevOps aspects won’t be possible without tools like Jenkins, Ansible, Docker or Puppet. Still, the tools only facilitate the process and allow to achieve the goal. Knowing how to create Docker container doesn’t necessary mean that you are in a DevOps club.
So that was all from my side in this article on What is DevOps. I hope you have understood everything that I have discussed here.
