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27 Feb 2020 | Sameer S Paradkar | 59 | 3 comments

Image by : Opensource.com

A great deal has happened since DevOps became a common term in the IT world. With
so much of the ecosystem being open source, it's important to review why it started and
what it means to IT careers.

What is DevOps?

While there is no single definition, I consider DevOps to be a process framework that

ensures collaboration between development and operations teams to deploy code to
production environments faster in a repeatable and automated way. We will spend the
rest of this article unpacking that statement.

The word "DevOps" is an amalgamation of the words "development" and "operations."

DevOps helps increase the speed of delivering applications and services. It allows
organizations to serve their customers efficiently and become more competitive in the
market. In simple terms, DevOps is an alignment between development and IT
operations with better communication and collaboration.

DevOps assumes a culture where collaboration among the development, operations,

and business teams is considered a critical aspect of the journey. It's not solely about
the tools, as DevOps in an organization creates continuous value for customers. Tools
are one of its pillars, alongside people and processes. DevOps increases organizations'
capability to deliver high-quality solutions at a swift pace. It automates all processes,
from build to deployment, of an application or a product.

The DevOps discussion centers around the relationship between developers, the
individuals who write software for a living, and operators, those responsible for
maintaining that software.

Challenges for the development team

Developers are typically enthusiastic and willing to adopt new approaches and
technologies to solve organizations' problems. However, they do face challenges, such
as:

The competitive marketplace creates a lot of pressure for on-time delivery.

They must cater to production-ready code management and new capability
implementation.
The release cycle is long, so the development team has to make several assumptions
before application deployment. In such a scenario, it takes more time to resolve issues
that occur during deployment in the production or staging environment.

Challenges for the operations team

Operators are historically focused on the stability and reliability of IT services. The
operations team is, therefore, concerned about making changes to resources,
technologies, or approaches as they look for stability. Their challenges include:

Managing resource contention as demands for resources increase

Handling redesigns or tweaks required for application execution in a production
environment
Diagnosing and resolving production-related issues after application deployment in
isolation

How DevOps addresses the dev and ops challenges

Instead of releasing a large number of application features at once, companies are trying
to see if they can roll out a small number of features to their customers through a series
of release iterations. This has several advantages, like better software quality, quicker
feedback from customers, etc. These, in turn, ensure high customer satisfaction. To
achieve these objectives, companies are required to:

Lower the failure rate for new releases

Increase deployment frequency
Achieve quicker mean time to recovery in the event a new release crashes the
application
Shorten the lead time between fixes

DevOps fulfills all these objectives and helps achieve seamless delivery. Organizations
adopt DevOps to achieve levels of performance that were unthinkable even a few years
ago. They are doing tens, hundreds, or even thousands of deployments per day while
delivering world-class reliability, stability, and security. (Read more about batch sizes
and the impact on software delivery.)

DevOps attempts to address a variety of problems that result from predecessor

methodologies, including:

The development and operation teams working in isolation

Testing and deployment as isolated phases done after design and build and requiring
more time than the build cycles
Team members spending excessive time in testing, deploying, and designing instead
of focusing on the core—creating business services
Manual code deployment leading to errors in production
Development and operations teams on separate, asynchronous timelines, which
causes additional delays

DevOps vs. agile vs. traditional IT

DevOps is often discussed in relation to other IT practices, notably agile and waterfall IT.

Agile is a set of principles, values, and methods for

producing software. For example, if you have an idea that More DevOps resources
you want to convert into software, you can leverage agile What is DevOps?
principles and values. But that software might only work in The ultimate DevOps hiring
the development or test environment. You need a way to guide
quickly and repeatably transfer the software into the
DevOps monitoring tools guide
production environment in a simple and safe way, and the
Getting started with DevSecOps
way is through DevOps tools and techniques. Agile
software development methodology focuses on DevOps terms: 10 essential
development processes, but DevOps is responsible for concepts
development and deployment—in the safest and most Latest DevOps articles
reliable way.

Comparing the traditional software waterfall model with DevOps is a good way to
understand the benefits DevOps provides. The following example assumes the
application is scheduled to go live in four weeks, coding is 85% complete, the
application is a fresh launch, and the process of procuring the servers to ship the code
has just been initiated.

Traditional process DevOps process

After placing an order for new After placing an order for new servers, the
servers, the development team development and operations teams work together
works on testing. The on the processes and paperwork to set up the new
operations team works on servers. This results in better visibility into the
extensive paperwork, as infrastructure requirements.
required in enterprises, to
deploy the infrastructure.

Details about failover, Details about failover, redundancy, disaster

redundancy, data-center recovery, data-center locations, and storage
locations, and storage requirements are known and correct due to the
requirements are skewed, as no inputs from the development team.
inputs are available from the
development team that has deep
knowledge of the application.

The operations team has no The operations team is completely aware of the
idea of the development team’s progress the development team is making. The
progress. The operations team operations team interact with the development
develops a monitoring plan team, and they jointly develop a monitoring plan
based on their understanding. that caters to the IT and business needs. They also
leverage application performance monitoring (APM)
tools.

Before go-live, the load test Before the go-live, the load test makes the
crashes the application, which application slow. The development team swiftly
delays the release. fixes the bottlenecks, and the application is
released on time.

DevOps lifecycle

DevOps includes the adoption of certain common practices.

Continuous planning

Continuous planning leverages lean principles in order to start smaller by identifying the
resources and outcomes needed to test the business value or vision, adapt continually,
measure progress, learn from the customers' needs, shift direction as needed with
agility, and update the business plan.

Collaborative development

The collaborative development process enables collaboration between business,

development, and test teams that are spread across different time zones to deliver
quality software continuously. This includes multiplatform development, support for
polyglot programming, creation of user stories, elaboration of ideas, and lifecycle
management. Collaborative development includes the process and practice of
continuous integration, which promotes frequent code integrations and automatic builds.
By integrating application code frequently, integration issues are identified earlier in the
lifecycle (when they are easier to fix), and the overall integration effort is reduced via
continuous feedback because the project shows continuous and demonstrable progress.

Continuous testing

Continuous testing reduces the testing cost while helping the development teams
balance speed and quality. It also eliminates testing bottlenecks through virtualized
services and simplifies the creation of virtualized test environments that can be easily
shared, deployed, and updated as systems change. These capabilities reduce the cost
of provisioning and maintaining test environments and shorten test-cycle times by
allowing integration testing early in the lifecycle.

Continuous release and deployment

This adoption path entails one major practice: continuous release and deployment.
Continuous release and deployment provide a continuous delivery pipeline that
automates key processes. It reduces the number of manual processes, wait times for
resources, and amount of rework by enabling push-button deployment that ensures
higher numbers of releases, reduced errors, and end-to-end transparency.

Automation plays a key role in ensuring the software is released repeatably and reliably.
One critical objective is to take manual processes like build, regression, deployment,
and infrastructure provisioning and automate them. This requires version control for
source code; test and deployment scripts; infrastructure and application configuration
data; and the libraries and packages the application depends on. The ability to query the
state of all environments is another important factor.

Continuous monitoring

Continuous monitoring ensures enterprise-grade reporting capabilities that help

development teams understand the availability and performance of applications in the
production landscape, even before they are deployed to production. The early feedback
provided by continuous monitoring is critical for lowering the cost of errors and for
steering projects in the right direction. This practice often includes observability tools,
which tend to expose metrics related to application performance.

Continuous feedback and optimization

Continuous feedback and optimization provide visual evidence for analyzing customer
journeys and pinpointing pain areas. Feedback can be enabled for both pre- and post-
production phases to maximize value and ensure that even more transactions are
successfully completed. This provides immediate visibility into the root cause of
customer struggles that affect behavior and impact business.

Benefits of DevOps

DevOps can facilitate a collaborative environment where developers and operators work
as a team toward common ends. A major milestone in this process is the implementation
of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). This enables teams to launch
software to the market faster with fewer errors.

Important benefits of DevOps are:

Predictability: DevOps offers a significantly lower failure rate for new releases.
Maintainability: It enables effortless recovery in the event of a new release crashing
or disabling the application.
Reproducibility: Versioning the builds or the code enables earlier versions to be
restored as needed.
Higher quality: Incorporating infrastructure issues improves application development
quality.
Time to market: Streamlined software delivery reduces time to market by 50%.
Reduced risk: Incorporating security into the software lifecycle reduces defects
across its lifecycle.
Cost-efficiency: Driving cost-efficiency in software development pleases senior
management.
Resiliency: The software system is more stable, secure, and changes are auditable.
Breaks larger codebase into manageable pieces: DevOps is based on the agile
programming method, which supports breaking down larger codebases into smaller,
more manageable chunks.

DevOps principles

DevOps adoption has produced several principles that have evolved (and are still
evolving). Most solution providers have developed their own variants. All these principles
take a holistic approach to DevOps, and organizations of all sizes can adopt them.

Develop and test against a production-like environment

The objective is to allow the development and quality assurance (QA) teams to develop
and test against systems that behave like production systems, so they can see how the
application behaves and performs well before it is ready for deployment.

The application should be exposed to production-like systems as early in the lifecycle as

possible to address three major potential issues. First, this permits the application to be
tested in an environment that is close to the actual environment. Second, it allows
application-delivery processes to be tested and validated upfront. Third, it enables the
operations team to verify early in the lifecycle how their environment will behave when
applications are deployed, thereby allowing them to create a finely tweaked, application-
aware environment.

Deploying with repeatable, reliable processes

This principle allows the development and operations teams to support an agile software
development process throughout the lifecycle. Automation is critical to creating
processes that are iterative, reliable, and repeatable. Hence, the organization must
create a delivery pipeline that enables continuous, automated deployment and testing.
Frequent deployments also allow teams to test the deployment processes, thereby
lowering the risk of deployment failures during actual releases.

Monitor and validate operational quality

Organizations are good at monitoring applications in production because they have tools
that capture metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) in real time. This principle
moves monitoring to early in the lifecycle, ensuring that automated testing monitors
functional and nonfunctional attributes of the application early in the process. Whenever
an application is tested and deployed, quality metrics should be captured and analyzed.
Monitoring tools provide early warning about operational and quality issues in the
landscape that may occur in production. These metrics should be gathered in a format
that all business stakeholders can understand and articulate.

Amplify feedback loops

One objective of DevOps processes is to enable organizations to react and make

changes more rapidly. In software delivery, this goal requires an organization to get early
feedback and then learn rapidly from every action it takes. This principle calls for
organizations to create communication channels that allow stakeholders to access and
act on feedback. Development may act by adjusting its project plans or priorities.
Production may act by enhancing production environments.

DevOps tools cheat sheet

# Domain Lifecycle Popular Open Source DevOps Tools

Kanboard, Wekan, and other alternatives to Trello; GitLab,

1 Plan Tuleap, Redmine, and other alternatives to JIRA;
Mattermost, Roit.im, IRC, and other alternatives to Slack

Git, Gerrit, Bugzilla; Jenkins and other open source CI/CD

2 Dev Code
tools

3 Build Apache Maven, Gradle, Apache Ant, Packer

4 Test JUnit, Cucumber, Selenium, Apache JMeter

5 Release
Kubernetes, Nomad, Jenkins, Zuul, Spinnaker, Ansible,
6 Deploy
Apache ZooKeeper, etcd, Netflix Archaius, Terraform
7 Ops Operate*

Grafana, Prometheus, Nagios, InfluxDB, Fluentd, and others

8 Monitor
covered in this guide

* Operating is best numbered as the final step for Operations teams, but its tooling
overlaps with release and deploy lifecycle stages. It was moved for ease of readability.

In conclusion

DevOps is an increasingly popular methodology that aims to connect developers and

operators into a cohesive unit. It's uniquely differentiated from traditional IT operations
and complements (but is not the same as) agile.

Would you consider your IT department to be DevOps adopters? Please tell your story
in the comments.

This article is an adaptation of DevOps Tools & Frameworks: Everything You Need To
Know. It has been republished with permission.

DevOps vs Agile: What's the

difference?
The difference between the two is what happens after
development.
Taz Brown (Correspondent)

7 CI/CD tools for sysadmins

An easy guide to the top open source continuous
integration, continuous delivery, and continuous
deployment tools.
Dan Barker (Correspondent)

A beginner's guide to building

DevOps pipelines with open source
tools
If you're new to DevOps, check out this five-step
process for building your first pipeline.
Bryant Son (Red Hat, Correspondent)

Topics : DevOps

About the author

Sameer S Paradkar - Sameer Paradkar is an Enterprise Architect with 15+ years of
extensive experience in the ICT industry, which spans across Consulting, Product
Development, and Systems Integration. He is an Open Group TOGAF, Oracle Master
Java EA, TMForum NGOSS, IBM SOA Solutions, IBM Cloud Solutions, IBM MobileFirst,
ITIL Foundation V3, COBIT 5, and AWS certified enterprise architect. He serves as an
advisory architect on Enterprise Architecture programs and continues to work as a
Subject Matter Expert. He has...

• More about me

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3 Comments

Marco Bravo on 27 Feb 2020 1

Nice article. I like it. Thanks for sharing.

Reply

Dandenong on 28 Feb 2020 1

nice

Reply

os on 16 Mar 2020 0
Nice Article, really its very helpful to the beginner's.

Reply

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