DevOps is a movement, by people who want to see a change in the IT industry. It can be said to be a culture that lays emphasis on the collaboration of software developers and IT professionals to automate the process of delivering software and infrastructure changes.

There is an implied assumption in the IT industry, or software industry to be more specific, that projects will be delivered late and will underperform. This is much more prevalent in the web-enabled spheres. This is, however, rapidly changing in today’s agile ecosystems.

What is DevOps?

DevOps can be best defined as group of concepts that have now become a movement and are spreading rapidly on the technical landscape. The term was a result of the merging of two major related terms. The first is called agile system administration or agile operations, which comes from applying the new Agile and Lean approach to operations. The second is the much amplified understanding of the value of collaboration amongst development and operations staff, through all stages of development lifecycle when creating and operating a service.

DevOps is not about one tool or another, it is about a mindset to use the correct tools to shorten and improve software development lifecycles. It was born as a result of increasing popularity of agile development. While Agile represents change in thinking, DevOps implements organizational cultural change. The manifesto for agile development contains detailed information about the idea. The main principles of agile development are described in the underlying graphic.

Benefits of DevOps

Measuring the benefits of DevOps can be challenging, but is possible. They can also be tuned into performance indicators and allow organizations to track the cost and time a project takes. We will discuss some of the benefits in this section.

1. Shorter Development cycle – As a result of increased collaboration and communication between development and operations teams, the time taken to move from engineering code to executable production code is shortened.
2. Increased Release Velocity – A shorter development cycle leads to increased frequency of release of code into production. This results in continuous development and deployment, increasing the value of IT to the business. Businesses with a well-managed DevOps have a competitive advantage as they are quick to market features needed by customers.
3. Improved Defect detection and Reduced Deployment Failures – As DevOps builds on top of Agile programming methodology, it can be considered as an extension of Agile programming. It uses several agile principles, one of them being the fragmentation of a large code into smaller fragments. This makes it easier to detect the defects in the code. The DevOps mindset also takes into account an operational viewpoint, which when combined with defect detection, reduces the number of deployment issues significantly.
4. Reduced Time-to-Recovery – Software failures can be minimized but it is hard to eradicate them completely. DevOps relatively reduces the time to recover to operational efficiency as compared to traditional IT environment when a software failure occurs.

DevOps aims to increase business value by making it agile through continuous delivery of products and services that satisfy customer needs, and also being focused on establishing an environment where building, testing and releasing a software can happen rapidly and more reliably.

#BringItOn