What happens when an application stops working? We usually hear the phrase “the issue is at your end” from everyone. Different teams start working in tandem to fix it, but that does take time.
As a result, the end-users suffer downtime, which led to dissatisfaction. Users don’t care what could be the potential cause of breakdown, and which team is responsible for fixing it, all they want is an uninterrupted service.
In the conventional model, there used to be a virtual barrier between the Operations and Developer teams. They might have different responsibilities and functions, but ultimately, they work together to achieve a common goal.
The Operations team is responsible for executing the usual functioning of business and software solution and ensuring it remains stable, whereas the Development team strive hard to implement the business requirements and update the working software solution according to the emerging requirements. as quickly as possible and add them to a working product.
A conflict can arise between these teams due to the nature of their function, which may jeopardize the product development and functioning, and that is where DevOps consulting services comes into the picture to prevent such conflicts.
DevOps culture is all about bringing the Operations and Development teams together and uniting them to collaborate and achieve a common objective.
Let’s understand what exactly DevOps is!
DevOps is short for Development Operations, and broadly it is a methodology or culture that could be adopted by an organization.
The DevOps methodology arose in 2008 and was devised to unravel the accumulated complex software development problems.
One of the biggest problems was the lack of effective interaction between the operations and development teams.
If a problem arises in the live environment then the operations team blames the developers, whereas developers think if code is running locally then it must be executed flawlessly in the live environment.
Due to such conflicts, the product releases used to be constantly delayed and it used to impact the overall quality of the final product.
Another issue is the roll-out of multiple changes, which used to trigger production problems and it used to be difficult for the production team to keep a track of the changes.
The primary objective of DevOps culture is to ensure all team members must own the responsibility of the final product.
The most interesting aspect of DevOps methodology is that it ensures that a specific person is not only responsible for his stage of work but is accountable for the functioning of the entire product.
The methodology is very simple, the problem is not on someone’s side – it’s a common problem for all, and each team member must contribute to fixing it.
Just like any other methodology or culture, DevOps also comes with some fundamental principles that are considered as the ground of its implementations.
The Teams (Development and Operational) must be independent throughout the product life cycle. It requires a balanced set of expertise of team members and specialists.
The team itself becomes a place for personal growth and development.
It means continuous adaptation to the dynamic business and customer needs, emerging technologies, and legal requirements.
Optimization of speed, reduction of losses and costs, simplification continuous improvement, and delivery of software products are the fundamental things you must be oriented to.
You must focus and invest in the development of services and products that will ensure higher customer satisfaction. You must design short feedback cycles with end-users and customers and develop activities in the true spirit of continuous innovation.
This principle logically refuses the conventional waterfall method and other process-oriented models, where each resource and team perform only a specific function or role without understanding the complete picture.
Organizations must remain focused on developing products that should be delivered to the real customers, and all employees must contribute to the product development company.
All the teams should be accountable for the complete product life cycle, right from the conceptual stage to the decommissioning.
You must think about Automation more than just software development processes including continuous delivery, continuous deployment, and continuous integration while developing the infrastructure code.
DevOps process flow primarily emphasize continuous work and implement automatization to enhance the product quality.
To get the requirements, prepare specifications, and plan the teamwork.
To code, the solution on laid down project architecture, review it and enhance its quality.
Review the product, identify errors and bugs, remove them using automated tools for testing.
It unifies previous coding and functionality and tests them.
Presentation of the developed solution and getting it ready to be launched.
It consists of activities carried out to continuously improve the product quality and user experience, once it is deployed in the live environment.
The development team continuously keeps reviewing the code to identify bugs.
Teams capture the feedback from the target audience and client to understand the areas where the product must be lacking and pass over this to the development team to equip the product with additional features.
DevOps best practices are strategies to assist the development team to automate processes and business workflows. Development and Operations teams are usually not engaged in the planning stage but remain active in other stages of the product development lifecycle.
Let’s dive deeper and get more about DevOps best practices :
It is a key component of Agile software development. It ensures constant entry and integration of code into a central repository after the efficacious launch of tests.
The primary objective of this practice is to find and fix potential issues as quickly as possible, enhance the software quality and reduce the time for releasing the software updates.
With the help of continuous integration, developers can perform the unit tests and then upload their changes to a central repository.
Then an effective version control system validates the code for seamless integration with the existing repository. It facilitates end-to-end code testing, which helps us to minimize potential risks.
It is a combination of practices that keep software updates constant. It guarantees accelerated code deployment to production without making a drastic change in the existing functionality.
Continuous delivery is possible due to different types of resource optimizations at the early stages of the development process. Continuous delivery offers adequate functionalities to the organization.
This enables them to fetch the response from the client and make some changes, if necessary.
Once the code is written, it needs to be checked thoroughly. This could be performed using several types of automated tools, these tools could be used for unit, integration, and UX tests.
Automated testing tools help us fetch information about any bugs in the software build, and developers can start fixing the issues without waiting for the outcome of manual testing.
It is often confused with continuous delivery, although there is a fundamental difference between them.
Continuous delivery is all about ensuring the constant release of product updates to the audience, whereas Continuous deployment ensures the availability of new functionalities to the end-users, immediately after the testing, without any sort of manual intervention of developers.
DevOps has been gaining massive traction among scaled enterprises, middle-sized, and startups to enhance their business’s efficiency, workflows, and revenue. You can also adopt DevOps philosophy to avail the following benefits:
DevOps methodology helps development teams to understand if the build is valid or not and help them to hop to the next stage in a quick fashion.
Development teams utilize automated tools and systems, that enable them to make products scalable and efficient.
DevOps helps with adequate optimization of all the resources at disposal. We can use automated tools, evolved processes to optimize resources and save a big of the development budget.
The usual perception is that speed doesn’t go hand in hand with security, but DevOps is an exception.
With its high-quality configuration management and automation capabilities, we can fortify security while developing solutions rapidly.
DevOps methodology ensures you get correct results, as the test starts from a point and goes through the same sequences in the same phases.
It is 2021, and we can witness the growing trend of practical applications of DevOps in almost every possible domain and industry.
DevOps has officially entered its second decade, and now the focus has moved beyond product delivery. It is no longer only about Dev and Ops, but it is also about several constraints between the users and the businesses.
DevOps has been migrating to a model, where it not only delivers innovative products and features but also adds unprecedented value to the business.
As far as the future of DevOps is concerned, the global DevOps market will reach $13 billion by 2025. It is considered a crucial and integral component for any business to attain success.
Let’s discuss some exciting and emerging DevOps trends, that are expected to influence and reshape the business landscape in the near future.
This is among the most popular DevOps trend, as it utilizes the ability of microservice architecture to combine unit fragments autonomously.
It ensures DevOps shall remain focused only on individual units to deliver complex applications rapidly. If we combine DevOps with Microservices architecture, then we can save time, resources, and cost.
Microservices Architecture also offers the below advantages:
Data science experts can use several DevOps tools to develop custom application development.
If DevOps is effectively used with Data Science, then production models could be rebuilt during testing earlier models that they have already developed.
This trend is certainly going to gain more traction as more data scientists and custom application development teams will work together on app development standards.
The DevOps methodology, Microservices architecture, and cloud-native approach have transformed the software development life cycle like never before.
DevOps amalgamates the production and testing environment, which helps developers detect all the issues or bugs before applications go live.
Implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in the DevOps pipelines can assist developers to execute automation efficiently.
We can witness the shift from DevOps to AIOps and DataOps that focus on AI/ML utilization to learn from logs, monitor performance metrics, or drive DevOps in a precise way.
Implementation of Continuous Delivery and Infrastructure Automation model enables DevOps teams to design and execute self-service.
The Infrastructure Automation tools also enable automated delivery services on the IaaS environment, on-premises, and provide customer-focused improvement and agility.
Infrastructure Automation benefits are following :
Hybrid and Multi-cloud strategies have been the strong foundation of an organization’s success and growth in the last few years.
These strategies provide the organizations with much-needed flexibility and freedom to host apps as per their business requirements.
AgileOps is an innovative IT operating model developed for digital businesses by adopting agile principles to build flexible working methods.
This technology is rapidly evolving and offering fruitful propositions to businesses. Developers can utilize containers to sandbox applications to avail resource constraints and security.
Container technology brings a wide range of scopes to enhance user security, system security, and performing user analytics.
With the technological advancements, the usage and deployment of containers will become more affordable in the future.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is an evolving field that has numerous applications for DevOps technology.
Nowadays, organizations are not concerned about developing an entire app infrastructure, they rather ask for a platform, where they can host their enterprise applications.
DevOps comes with several apps that provide PaaS solutions for robust containerization, effective configuration handling, and constant security.
DevOps will further improve in the future, and it will enable the developers to define only the markets and pair of entry points in their applications.
In the past couple of years, we have been witnessing the transformation of a conventional on-premises model. If we go by the industry trends, organizations are gradually shifting to PaaS, SaaS, and DBaaS solutions.
Public clouds are getting massively popular in the market and their acceptability has been improved a lot.
Even the conventional organizations are exploring the methods to enable their transition to cloud-based solutions and Edge services, to avail unprecedented cost and resource-saving.
Kubernetes enables streamlined development, deploying pipelines, and automated testing in DevOps managed services by allowing developers to share their code and dependencies with the IT operations team.
It provides several effective tools to cater to the ever-changing business demands while moving the responsibility of running and managing the applications on the cloud service provider.
Kubernetes assists organizations to execute the software when transitioning smoothly and securely from one environment to another.
CMPs for DevOps helps organizations to avail higher degree of visibility into their cloud deployments. It enables businesses to monitor and control their cloud computing resources efficiently.
CMPs for DevOps adoption can offer you the following benefits :
We are pretty much sure that by now you must have got the gist of the importance of DevOps in software development and how it is evolving with time.
After the COVID pandemic, most of the organizations are paying attention to their digital transformations, team dynamics, leadership, and culture and this trend is only going to increase in the future.
That also means that DevOps’s significance is going to enhance further.
As per the current trends, DevOps will remain a highly adopted methodology in the near future as it ensures better team collaboration and efficient application development via incremental launches.
DevOps also helps organizations to cut down app development costs and efforts significantly while offering a unique development model that can accustom with the ever-changing business requirements and market demands.
DevOps also assimilate well with emerging technologies such as AI, ML, Data Analytics.
It will continue to disrupt both operations and development and enable organizations to remain focused on creating value and managing the value stream.
After carefully considering the DevOps trends and predictions, it won’t be wrong to mention that the future of DevOps lies in self-service capabilities, hybrid design, prioritizing edge, and becoming cloud-centric to offer exceptional business value and benefits.
DevOps is a software engineering practice or a culture that assimilates the software development process and the Operational teams for accelerated and continuous product deliveries. It allows the fast flow of work via multiple frequent releases, along with a wide-ranging and early feedback mechanism on Changes and Automation wherever it is applicable.
As far as Software and Infrastructure development is concerned, the core operations of DevOps are Application development, Code development, Code coverage, Unit testing, Solution Packaging, Deployment with infrastructure, Resource Configuration, Provisioning, and Orchestration.
Software Development firms often utilize certain DevOps-friendly tools which are known as ‘DevOps Toolchain’. The objective of DevOps Toolchain is to shorten, streamline, and automate several stages of the software development and delivery pipeline. These tools encourage collaboration, automation, and strong integration between operational and software development teams. The DevOps Toolchain consists of Code, Build, Test, Package, Configure, Release and Monitor methods, along with Infrastructure as a Code and Continuous Integration as key elements.
DevOps is in huge demand in almost every Industry and Sector. on-demand everywhere. It doesn’t matter if we have a Small or Middle-sized business or a scaled Organization, DevOps allows any organization to break the silos between their operational and development teams to improve overall productivity and efficiency. DevOps has shown the industries an innovative path where software culture could be driven by enhanced communication and strong collaboration, which ultimately helped them to achieve all their organizational objectives.
No, DevOps is not the same as Agile. However, Agile could be utilized as a part of DevOps. Agile Methodology includes an iteration of software development and testing process in the SDLC process, where it focuses on iterative, evolutionary, and incremental development.
On the other hand, DevOps is a software development practice that focuses more on integration, communication, and strong collaboration among the software development and Operational teams to enable accelerated deployment of software solutions.