The Evolution from Agile to DevOps

Agile’s iterative approach did help many organizations to deliver faster and high-quality
software; yet, the development and operations team worked in silos. This can result in
missed deadlines, delays and bottlenecks in software development, breakdown of new
features, lack of clarity on issues, etc. So, DevOps – a new approach emerged to augment the
potential of Agile software development and remove the barriers between Dev and Ops
team.
What is DevOps?
• DevOps is a fast-paced software delivery approach that supports the process of agile
software development methodology. It improves the collaboration between the Dev and Ops
team, accelerates the deployment cycles and enables enterprises to deliver high-quality
applications with speed and accuracy without compromising quality. In addition to bringing
collaboration between teams, companies need to understand the tools and practices crucial
to the DevOps lifecycle.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment
• Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment is an integral part of the DevOps
lifecycle. These two approaches allow integrating and deploying the code without a delay
which improves the frequency and quality of software delivery. It cuts the development time
from months or weeks to days or even hours. Application changes are done faster and
frequently reach the production environment. Thus, accelerates the prototype development
cycle and reduces deployment time.
 The Evolution from Agile to DevOps
Continuous Integration
• Continuous Integration (CI) refers to a software development practice of integrating
code into a central repository frequently so developers can get feedback on the
changes immediately upon committing code and can fix the errors quickly. The main
aim of continuous integration is to improve software quality and reduce time to
market.

Continuous Delivery
• Continuous delivery is a software development practice that can change the code, or
fix bugs quickly and deploy all code into a testing environment or a production
environment after the build stage.

Continuous Deployment
• Continuous deployment is one step ahead of continuous delivery. The code change
that deployed in the production stage is directly released to the customer without
human intervention. Only the failed test will abort the deployment process, leading to
human intervention. The automation helps to deploy the written codes in real-time.
 DevOps best practices

• Traditional IT had two separate teams in any organization – the

development team and the operations team.
• The development team works on the software, developing and
releasing it after ensuring that the code works perfectly.
• The Operations team works on deployment, load balancing and
release management to make SaaS live. They check the application
performance and report back any issues, if existent to development
team. These cycles went too long for companies and stimulated a
need to build a team of mixed expertise of development, QA and
Operations, introducing the phenomenon of DevOps.
• DevOps bridges the gap between two teams and help them operate
and evolve applications quickly and reliably.
• The question is, how well do we really know DevOps and why do we
need it?
 DevOps best practices

What is DevOps?
As the name sounds, Devops is related to development and
operations. It defines a set of processes that brings a cultural shift
to an organization by developing collaboration between the
development and operations team. It has four key components:
collaboration, practices, culture, and tools.

Why Do We Need Devops?

DevOps brings the next level of collaboration and speed that
enables organizations to deliver with improved time to market,
enhanced productivity, reduced operational cost to serve
customers efficiently, and stay competitive in the market. It also
helps in faster product release, manage unplanned work, capture
and solve the critical issues quicker
Implementing DevOps Best Practices
 Implementing DevOps Best Practices

• Setup Centralized Unit

• DevOps uses various tools like Jenkins, Terraform, Nagios, Grafana, Prometheus, or Splunk. The organization should
set-up a centralized unit for the creation and operation of these tools. This centralized unit is responsible to set-up
agile practices in the development team. This team investigates new tools, upholdsit, and provides guidance programs
and training to implement DevOps.

• Continuous Integration (CI)

• CI is a software development practice that improves collaboration amongst the team and helps to build high-quality
software. The Development team regularly check-in code changes in the repository, CI executes automated builds and
tests to validate the quality of code. Continuous Integration imposes practices that enables quick detection of
challenges of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) at an early stage which helps the development team to solve
issues in the development phase itself.

• Continuous Deployment (CD)

• Deployment process has various stages like Development → Build → Validation → Build versioning → Deployment →
Post-deployment, etc. The idea of Continuous Deployment process is to deploy developed code automatically to the
production environment after build passes all stages of QA-staging-beta, Integration, UAT, etc. There are tools available
like Spinnaker, Jenkins, Harness, Ansible, Chef, Puppet etc. which enables the DevOps team to set-up automated
pipelines to deploy on several environments with minimum human intervention.
• Continuous Delivery is a DevOps practice where a new codebase gets tested by a QA team on different stages of
automated and manual QA cycles.If the codebase passes the QA cycle and is approved by the QA team, it gets
deployed to production. This is how DevOps enables the team to build, test, and release codebase quicker and
frequently by dividing it into short cycles. This enables organizations to provide more releases, reduce manual
deployments, and minimize failure risk in production.
 Implementing DevOps Best Practices

• Configuration Management (CM)

• Configuration and Change Management are important parts of DevOps cycle. Configuration Management is automation of
configuration, monitoring, managing and maintenance of all entities of infrastructure and systems like servers, applications,
storage, networks, and all managed services.
• Configuration management brings in several advantages like simplifying new environment setup, reducing production
configuration risks, and saves lot of time for software development instead of investing time and efforts for initiating new services
from scratch using Infrastructure-as-a-Code practice.
• Change Management
• Change management is a process of requesting, planning, implementing, and evaluating the changes that are needed to meet new
requirements. During the configuration management, if there are any changes required in the existing system and infrastructure, at
that time change management comes into picture. Operations teams need to provide their inputs, reasons for change, and
consequences might arise on a wider level including other systems that could be impacted with new changes.
• Keep all teams on the same page
• DevOps works with different departments so communication is important. And it’s important to keep everyone on the same page
to avoid conflicts in teams. To apply the strategy correctly, higher involvement and adoption is vital to keep all teams and members
on the same page.
• Test Automation
• Automated testing of each codebase helps in running more tests,  increases testing frequency, and saves time thatis spent on
manual QA. This process enables early bug detections, bug-fixing and enhances overall software quality. There are several tools
available which can integrate with DevOps tools like Selenium, RobotFramework, Appium, XCUITest, JUnit etc. for test automation.
• Continuous Monitoring (CM)
• Continuous Monitoring suggests to monitor all systems and infrastructure using several tools, dashboards and alerts including real
time insights of different metrics impacting the software like system performance, number of tests, success and failure rates,
deployment status, error logs and all information in graphical, tabular and detailed report format. To accomplish such monitoring
DevOps team can setup several tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios, Appdynamics, NewRelic, Splunk, Logstash and many more
are available in market.
 DevOps Services and Consultation

The digital wave has compelled enterprises to converge their

development and operations with the rest of the organization.
The key concerns raised by organizations are either on stability,
timely release or addressing the issues before they impact the
end users. 
The prime goal of DevOps is bridging the gap between
development and operations, thereby improving efficiency and
speed at each stage of the product lifecycle.
 DevOps service provider, has expertise in following.
 DevOps workflow automation.
 Continuous integration and deployment pipeline. 
Microservices architecture .
 Dockerization.
DevOps Lifecycle phases
 Expertise

DevOps focused digital transformation

Continuous testing and performance monitoring via
Selenium, JMeter, Appium, Cucumber, etc
Agile development using Node, AngularJS, Java, PHP
Microservices architecture
Continuous integration with GitHub, Bitbucket,
Kubernetes, Ansible, etc.
Continuous deployment using Docker, Jenkins,
Maven, Bamboo, etc.
 DevOps Toolchain
DevOps relies heavily on automation. Thus, a well-defined DevOps automation tool chain is
essential to automate end-to-end software development and deployment processes.
There are numerous tools available to simplify CI/CD pipelines.
 Benefits of DevOps

• Quick software delivery:- DevOps empower organizations to deliver new

software with speed and quality by implementing the right methods
• Enhanced Agility:- DevOps enables organizations to achieve scalability and
agility for better business outcomes
• Reduced Manual Efforts:- With DevOps comes automation, which ensures
robust and reliable deployments, lower failure rates, labor cost, and faster
recovery from incidents
• Efficient Sprint Cycles:- With effective collaboration between cross-functional
teams facilitated by automated feedback and continual monitoring enables to
synchronize the production release and delivery cycles
• Minimal Defects:- DevOps reduces the error rate by continuous improvement
in software delivery to make a viable solution
• Enhanced Collaboration:- DevOps removes the barrier between operations
and the development team. This brings transparency and efficiency in the
software development lifecycle.