DevOps eliminates the barriers between the development and IT operations teams. As a technique, it helps an IT firm better serve its clients, protect its software, and promote its applications.
As the popularity of DevOps increases, so does the marketing spin surrounding it; every systems integrator and tool provider puts a unique spin on DevOps to attract clients, which can cloud the genuine meaning.
The DevOps approach requires strong communication between operations and development teams across the whole service lifecycle, from concept to production. It is not possible to purchase DevOps online. This is not a product but rather a cultural movement. A lack of silos between teams inevitably modifies their working relationships to foster mutual trust and advantage.
Let’s examine the fundamental concepts of DevOps and the major phases of the DevOps process.
DevOps principles
Seven fundamental ideas constitute the basis of DevOps:
- Maintain version control on all artifacts of production. As part of their CI/CD pipelines, development, and IT operations teams must store their production artifacts under a centralized version control system.
- Implement CI/CD. Teams continually distribute software updates and patches instead of on a predetermined schedule.
- Automate acceptance testing of executable system behavior standards.
- Implement peer review methods. Testers, developers, and system administrators must collectively evaluate production changes using a defined and methodical methodology.
- Establish a culture of trust. No one should dread asking difficult questions, engaging in arguments, or accepting responsibility since the fear of retaliation no longer exists. A high-trust culture also allows teams to experiment with new tools and methods that increase product delivery without fear of failure.
- Establish proactive monitoring procedures in the production environment. Provide customized reports and warnings to stakeholders and all other interested parties based on the configuration of your monitoring instruments. Organizational stakeholders include technical, security, and business leadership.
- cultivate win-win connections across the enterprise. Development and IT operations can only thrive with help. Everyone is on the same team. This also includes expanding partnerships to customer success, professional services, and sales teams in the present economic context.
To implement these concepts, a corporation must often bring in an outside party to guide its IT employees in the proper direction. No team or stakeholder can attain these heights independently. Management teams, as well as senior engineers and system administrators, must foster a culture of collaboration.
Deconstruct the DevOps procedure.
DevOps entails a delivery pipeline that enables teams to continually build and distribute software and make urgent security and feature upgrades. Some industry people refer to the continuous integration and development process as the DevOps infinite loop. Continuous product iteration does not include a waterfall or final phase.
However, it is the responsibility of each firm to design its DevOps infinite loop. Spend time planning and documenting procedures; feel free to modify them if something needs to be fixed. With the developments in AI and reporting and analytics technologies, technical, cybersecurity, and business stakeholders must also be thoughtful about their data and reporting needs for each step.
Here is a look at the significant phases commonly involved in DevOps implementations to educate your own.
Planning.
During this phase, the development and IT operations teams and other stakeholders identify the intended features, along with an iteration value and criteria for each project phase. Developers, cybersecurity specialists, system administrators, product management, product marketing, and technical writers must all be at the development plan table.
Developers and writers should include content milestones in the overall project plan and initiate project documentation activities at this point. Hugo, Jekyll, and Docusaurus are becoming the preferred publishing technologies for internal and external documentation.
Plans for a project should be stored in a centralized, secure repository. Project plans should be stored there if your company has standardized on an all-in-one DevOps platform, such as GitLab. Plan and other project documents should be centralized on a platform like JetBrains Space or Wrike. In this phase, visual whiteboard technologies such as Miro and Mural prove their worth. Moreover, every team member should have access to the project plans at any time and from any location.
Code and construct
Some teams view the processes of coding and construction as distinct. Determine what will work best for your company. Feel free to iterate on these DevOps process aspects based on workforce availability and other project considerations.
Developers conduct their allotted coding job during the code phase. When they have completed a job, they must check it into a centralized source code repository, such as GitLab or GitHub, which must act as the authoritative source of code.
AI and machine learning in the form of developer productivity-enhancing tools such as GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeGuru, and Amazon CodeWhisperer might be helpful as more organizations seek new developer productivity-enhancing technologies.
If your teams produce and deploy containers, they should verify them in a common repository, such as Mirantis Secure Registry or the secure container registry provided by your cloud provider.
The build step involves retrieving software code from the centralized repository using an automated tool, such as Chef, Puppet, or the build component of an all-inclusive DevOps platform. This automation tool compiles the software code into a binary artifact, runs functional tests, and publishes the artifact to a centralized shared repository.
Integration without interruption
Continuous integration is the process through which development teams incorporate code into a shared repository. Businesses automate code reviews, validation, and testing.
Testing.
DevOps testing relies on intelligent automation but will not replace human software testers on the development team. Using technologies like Selenium or JUnit, developers may perform continuous testing via automation to test various codebases in parallel. A technique for automated testing assures that an application’s functioning is flawless.
Additionally, automated testing generates codebase-specific data that can be given directly to developers and stakeholders. An organization’s stakeholders may use this reporting to get insight into the development cycle and product maturity.
Continuous deployment.
DevOps eliminates the manual “all hands on deck” procedure after the development cycle. Instead, with continuous deployment, every code change is immediately sent through the pipeline and into production. A company may plan as many daily deployments as necessary based on the requirements and team velocity.
Operations.
During this step of the DevOps process, IT administrators oversee software creation. Ansible, Puppet, PowerShell, Chef, Salt, and Otter provide essential data collecting and administration capabilities and operational visibility into production applications. During this phase, AI plays an increasing role in data collecting and reporting.
Continuous observation.
Continuous monitoring of production applications by the development and operations teams is required. All organisations and their stakeholders need visibility into the health of the application. In addition, create cooperation and communication channels to notify all groups of production problems as they arise. The metrics recorded during this phase demonstrate your project’s performance and contribute to your DevOps strategy’s success as a whole.
Conclusion
There are multiple stages in the process of DevOps which not many understands that’s why 10Pearls is providing you DevOps as a Service in which our top notch talent for DevOps who not only understands the technicality better but also make sure to fulfill all your business needs on time.
