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In the conventional siloed application development methodologies, the development team builds a package and throws it to the operational teams. In this system, the application is developed by one group, and a separate team uses it. There is no ownership. Also, it gives a hard time for the operational staff because most of the software bugs arise in the live environment.
DevOps is a perfect solution to come out of these problems created by conventional development methodologies. DevOps is a set of concepts, tools, and practices to combine development and operational efforts with cross-functional teams for high-quality software application developments. It gets its several aspects from Agile methodology.
DevOps learns the software development life cycle and enables continuous delivery. Since the final software product is a joint effort of both development and operational teams, both parties have ownership of the application. DevOps minimize a hard time given to the operational staff in the live environment because they involve the system from the development stage. Most of the bugs have been fixed in the early stages with the involvement of the operational staff.
What is a DevOps Pipeline?
Wondering what is a DevOps pipeline? DevOps supports a new practice called ‘CI/CD pipeline’ (a chain of processing elements for continuous integration and delivery) with its Agile way of working. The development and operational teams work together with a set of automated processes and tools. CI/CD is a method to frequently deliver software apps to customers by automating app development stages. DevOps pipeline is supported by many automated and customized tools such as JFrog Pipelines, Kubernetes, Jenkins, GitLab, Katalon (an automated and continuous testing tool that supports many CI/CD tools), and several others.
Benefits of DevOps
- Improved customer focus
DevOps improves development teams’ focus on the customer by working with the customer from the early stages of the entire software development life cycle. This approach puts the developer in the customers’ shoes. The shorter releases enable immediate customer feedback and fast resolutions.
- Combine teams for faster deployments
Because DevOps unites the development team with the operation teams, it reduces the bottlenecks and non-productive time between the development process elements. For instance, the developer might not have more waiting time to get feedback on each development element. Also, a joint effort of the cross-functional teams enables them to do the things right at the first time that minimize the rework. With this approach, the organization makes massive improvements in the development time while maintaining the quality of the product.
- Simplifies the development process
With DevOps, the development team does not release complex packages at a time. The DevOps approach enables the development team to release smaller releases at a time. This approach simplifies your work, prioritizing and applying changes to each release.
- Enables automation in the development process
Suppose there are bigger releases that happen once or twice a year like in conventional development systems. In that case, it doesn’t create a requirement for automation. However, with the faster releases, which occur frequently, DevOps makes room for automation and innovations to reduce manual work and save time, this is where specialized firms like DuploCloud come in. Duplocloud automates DevOps practices making teamwork more efficient. Many routine aspects of your releases, such as testing and specification writing, can be automated and save time. It creates room for more innovations.
- Maintain the security
DevOps preserves compliance and security with automated compliance policies, configuration management techniques, and fine-grained controls.
- Minimize the cost of production
This approach cuts down most of the non-productive elements in the development value stream with a perfect collaboration among the teams. A few examples are waiting times of developers and operational staff, repetitive work, rework, etc.
How does DevOps Work?
DevOps combines continuous phases of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) repeated until the final application’s deployment that exceeds the customer expectations. These phases can be briefly explained as below:
Phase 01: Plan
The project team organizes and schedules the project tasks. The project manager sets up the project management tools.
Phase 02: Code
The development team writes codes, and System administrators review using code management tools. They merge the code once reviewed.
Phase 03: Build
Engineer teams build artifacts and source codes in the target format. Then they use CI/CD tools to verify source codes.
Phase 04: Test
Testing teams ensure high quality by implementing the testing tools in the workflow. They receive feedback on the business risks, and they determine the performance.
Phase 05: Release
The project team implements the package tools to adhere to the business requirements and goals, validate the packages and critical practices. Then the project team does the change management, approves the software releases, and releases automation and application deliveries.
Phase 06: Deploy
The final version of the build is deployed once the production environment is created and configured correctly.
Phase 07: Operate
The operation team monitors and troubleshoots the applications. The security team ensures software security and manages backups and logs.
Phase 08: Monitor
Operational teams monitor the system performance, user experience and maintain logs.
Top Companies Who Use DevOps
Most of the companies are shifting to DevOps, including the following list of top companies.
- Amazon
- HP
- Etsy
- Netflix
- Adobe
