DevOps is a development and release methodology that encourages faster, better application creation and delivery of new or improved software features or products to consumers.
DevOps encourages smoother, continuous communication, collaboration, integration, visibility, and transparency between application development teams (Dev) and their IT operations team (Ops).
The closer connection between “Dev” and “Ops” is evident at every stage of the DevOps lifecycle, from software planning to code, build, test, and release phases to deployment, operations, and ongoing monitoring. This connection motivates a feedback loop that never stops, with customers providing further enhancements, development, testing, and deployment. One consequence of these efforts may be the faster and more continuous release of essential feature adjustments or additions.
DevOps goals may be divided into four categories: culture, automation, measurement, and sharing (CAMS), and DevOps tools can help with each of these areas. Automating, simplifying, and streamlining previously labor-intensive, manual, or static integration, development, testing, deployment, and monitoring activities is one of the many uses for continuous integration.
DevOps History
DevOps methods for speeding software development and deployment have their roots in agile software development and lean programming. DevOps, on the other hand, began as a grassroots movement to unify the efforts of developers and operations team members.
During the early 2000s, the necessity to keep popular websites like Google and Flickr available against massive traffic spikes became apparent. This demand resulted in software reliability engineers (SREs) being hired—operations staff who worked closely with developers to ensure that the sites remained up and running after code went live in production.
In 2009, Flickr developers John Allspaw and Paul Hammond presented their own DevOps-style approach at a conference. Their presentation was entitled “10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr.” The same year, Patrick Debois organized the first “DevOps Day” in Belgium. As additional DevOps Days were organized around the world, the #DevOps hashtag became popular and gained steam.
Over the following years, new open-source tools and frameworks were created to help DevOps achieve its objectives.
Why is DevOps so Important?
A core value of DevOps, as well as its efforts to break down communication and collaboration barriers between development and IT operations teams, is customer happiness and faster value delivery. In addition, DevOps is intended to accelerate business growth by fostering continuous process improvement.
DevOps is a method for improving the delivery of business value to an organization’s ultimate customers. This may include more frequent product releases, enhancements, or updates.It might be defined as the time it takes for a product release or new feature to reach customers’ hands—all while maintaining the appropriate levels of quality and security. It may also focus on how quickly an issue or bug is discovered, fixed, and re-released.
Underlying infrastructure also enables DevOps by providing for smooth software performance, availability, and reliability as it is initially developed and tested before being put into production.
DevOps Processes and Techniques
There are a few standard DevOps techniques that businesses may use to speed up and enhance product development and release. They’re all software development methodologies and practices. Scrum, Kanban, and Agile are three of the most popular ones:
- Scrum. Scrum is a framework for managing projects that are under development or testing. It defines how teams should work together to accelerate development and quality assurance activities. Key processes (sprints, time boxes, daily scrum [meeting]), as well as specialized language and roles (Scrum Master, product owner), are part of Scrum procedures.
- Kanban. Kanban was derived from Toyota’s factory floor efficiency. The state of a software project’s work in progress (WIP) should be tracked on a Kanban board, according to Kanban.
- Agile. Agile software development methods, which were previously important in agile software development, continue to have a large influence on DevOps processes and tools. Many DevOps techniques, such as Scrum and Kanban, include agile programming elements.Agile is a software development method that emphasizes quick and efficient delivery of projects. It includes such agile practices as documenting requirements as user stories, conducting daily standups, and incorporating customer feedback. Agile also calls for shorter software development cycles than conventional “waterfall” methodologies.
The DevOps Toolchain
DevOps followers frequently utilize certain DevOps-friendly tools as part of their DevOps “toolchain.” The aim of these tools is to aid in the continuous streamlining, shortening, and automation of the software delivery process (also known as the “pipeline”). Cloud-based monitoring and management software is also available. Such applications provide a centralized view of all IT assets, enabling users to manage them remotely as well. Many such tools also promote key DevOps concepts such as automation, collaboration, and integration between development and operations teams. The following is a sample of tools employed during various DevOps lifecycle phases.
- Plan. The Checklist phase is when you lay out each requirement and describe how your service will solve them. Jira or Git are two examples of useful tools for keeping track of known problems and managing projects.
- Code. The second stage is the development of software applications using code. GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Stash are just a few example tools.
- Build. In this stage, you maintain software builds and versions, as well as automate tools to assist with the compilation and packaging of code for future release to production. You’ll use source code repositories or package repositories that “package” infrastructure required for product release. Docker, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Gradle, Maven, or JFrog are all popular in this category.
- Test. Unit Testing, Smoke Testing, Regression Testing, and Performance Testing are usually done in this stage. This phase involves continuous testing (manual or automated) to ensure optimal code quality. You’ll use various testing tools such as Selenium, CircleCI, TestNG, or BlazeMeter., JMeter, WebPagetest, or Gatling for performance testing. These same tools can be used to generate load and measure the results.
- Deploy. This stage is where you put the code into production and manage, coordinate, schedule, and automate future product releases. You’ll use a configuration management tool, such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Jenkins, Kubernetes, OpenShift, OpenStack, Docker, or Jira to ensure that all servers are kept in sync with the most recent changes.
- Operate. This phase is concerned with software management during production. Ansible, Puppet, PowerShell, Chef, Salt, or Otter are just a few of the tools available.
- Monitor. You need to be able to measure results and analyze data to find ways to improve the process. In this stage, we must analyze and compile information about problems from a specific production release of software. This is where tools such as Nagios, Splunk, Sensu, and ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) come in. These tools can be used to monitor everything from system performance to application logs.
So what is DevOps? In short, it’s a set of tools and practices that helps you automate the software delivery process to shorten the time it takes to get code into production. It also helps you improve collaboration between development and operations teams, which can lead to better-quality code and more efficient use of resources. And finally, it helps you monitor your systems so you can identify and fix problems more quickly. If you’re interested in learning more about DevOps, or in adopting some of these tools and practices into your workflow, there are plenty of resources available on SiLabs.
DevOps Methods
DevOps is a set of tools, processes, and procedures that enable software development teams to collaborate more effectively. Automation, continuous improvement, and iteration are all concepts mentioned in DevOps theory. Many practices focus on one or more phases of the development cycle. These include:
- Continuous development. This is a technique that includes both the planning and coding phases of the DevOps lifecycle. Version control tools may be used.
- Continuous testing. Continually executing automated, pre-programmed, and continuous code tests as application code is developed or updated can help to reduce delivery time.
- Continuous integration (CI). By adopting this technique, you may use configuration management (CM) tools in tandem with other test and development software to track how much of the code being developed is ready for deployment. It necessitates fast feedback between testing and development to identify and fix coding problems.
- Continuous delivery. This technique enables you to automatically push code changes following testing to a preproduction or staging environment. A member of staff may then decide to release such modifications into production.
- Continuous deployment (CD). Continual deployment is similar to continuous delivery in that it automates the introduction of new or modified code into production. A company employing continuous deployment may release code or feature modifications several times a day. Continuous deployment can be enabled by using container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, which help to maintain code consistency across different deployment platforms and environments.
- Continuous monitoring. Continuous monitoring of both the code in use and the underlying infrastructure that supports it is an essential component of this method. A feedback loop that reports on bugs or issues then returns to development.
- Infrastructure as code. This practice may be used throughout various DevOps phases to automate the provisioning of infrastructure for a software release. Developers create infrastructure “code” from within their existing development tools. For example, developers may generate a storage volume on-demand using Docker, Kubernetes, or OpenShift. Monitoring environment settings, tracking modifications, and automating configuration tasks are also often managed through infrastructure as code.
- Configuration management (CM). Configuration management tools help development teams manage the configurations of hardware and software components within their environments. Puppet, Ansible, and Chef are all examples of configuration management tools. These tools can help you automate tasks such as patching systems, installing software, and making config changes across multiple servers.
- Change management. Change management is the process of planned, coordinated, and controlled activities that ensure changes to a system are introduced in a safe and orderly manner. Configuration management tools can help automate many aspects of change management, such as tracking who made what changes and when they were made.
What are the advantages of DevOps?
The case for DevOps is compelling. It’s a common refrain that adopting DevOps process can lead to more satisfied users, resulting in higher loyalty and retention rates. The following are just a few of the advantages of using DevOps:
- Increased speed and quality of product delivery
- Reduced occurrence of issues, faster problem resolution
- Greater scalability and availability
- Operating environments that are more stable
- Increased resource efficiency
- More automated processing
- Improved monitoring of system outcomes
- More innovation
DevOps is a set of techniques that allow development and IT operations teams to work together more efficiently. It can help companies save money, reduce time-to-market for new code releases, increase scalability and availability, provide better customer service by reducing the number of inbound support requests from users, lead to increased innovation among developers as they are able to deploy code changes more quickly and much more. In short, the benefits of DevOps are many.
