DevOps

Benefits of DevOps

What tangible benefits can DevOps practices bring your company?

Speed

Development and operations teams can deliver results much faster. The DevOps methodology enables them to adapt faster to changing markets and improve product efficiency and performance. Thanks to principles like continuous delivery, they can produce deliverables more frequently and automate processes. In short, it increases the software delivery process.

Rapid deployment

Rapid deployment is based on continuous integration and continuous delivery principles and involves increasing the frequency and speed of releases. These principles allow DevOps teams to introduce changes and fix bugs faster to fulfill user needs and expectations. Furthermore, they enable them to gain an additional competitive advantage.

Security

DevOps allows you to maintain a high level of security by conducting security audits and tests. Security teams can also use DevOps tools such as automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques.

Quality and reliability

A DevOps team can ensure product reliability and quality by frequently testing software and checking its functionality. Principles such as monitoring, continuous integration, and continuous delivery support the introduction of changes by ensuring their safety and maintaining a positive user experience.

Improved collaboration

The DevOps culture fosters efficient and effective collaboration between development teams and operations teams. By following DevOps methodologies, teams take accountability and ownership of processes, which allows them to save time and share responsibilities.

Scalability

The DevOps model enables your company to manage infrastructure and processes at scale. It helps reduce the risks involved with managing complex systems and implementing changes. An infrastructure-as-code principle organizes production environments, testing, and development processes more efficiently.

DevOps practices

DevOps practices allow your teams to innovate faster by automating and streamlining processes.

Continuous integration

The main purposes of continuous integration are finding and fixing bugs faster, enhancing software quality, and reducing the time it takes to validate and realize software updates.

DevOps teams can achieve this effect by regularly merging code changes into a central repository where automated builds and tests happen.

Continuous delivery

Continuous delivery works in tandem with continuous integration and deploys all code changes to a testing or production environment.

This allows new changes in the code to be automatically tested and prepared for release. With continuous delivery, developers always have deployment-ready code that was properly tested.

Situational awareness

Situational awareness is about keeping every member involved in the development process informed and updated.

Everybody needs to know about any issues and failed tests and receive updates regarding application performance so that they can perform their tasks correctly and effectively.

Automation

Automation is one of the most important aspects of DevOps practices because it speeds up and streamlines many processes.

For example, it enables DevOps teams to develop and deploy high-quality software quickly. The introduction of automation into the software development process allows companies to save a great deal of time.

Infrastructure as code

The infrastructure as code principle involves managing and treating your infrastructure like code through software development techniques like version control and continuous integration.

Thanks to this, DevOps teams can interact with infrastructure using code-based tools and treat it like application code. This simplifies infrastructure and server deployment and ensures they are equipped with up-to-date patches and versions.

Monitoring

DevOps teams continuously monitor the software development cycle, which allows them to respond almost immediately to any emerging issues or problems with user experience.

They oversee the planning, development, integration, testing, deployment, and operations stages to address all potential challenges in the production process.

Microservices in DevOps methodology

The core of microservices is the division of complex work, software development, systems, and processes into smaller, more straightforward, and independent parts (services).

Services differ in purpose and functions, but they have one thing in common: their independence from other services. This allows them to be developed in smaller teams working in an agile manner.

Continuous integration in this method involves regularly implementing changes to the main branch of the code and automatically testing the results, which helps maintain its stability.

Continuous delivery is based on the automated release of new versions in a production environment.

DevOps also helps manage individual code versions. Version control systems allow for automatic and effective tracking of versions and the history of changes.

They offer the ability to restore code to a stable, bug-free, and conflict-free version.

The popularity of the DevOps methodology is not accidental and stems from its numerous advantages:

• Update and innovation cycles are more frequent
• A portion of processes is automated and, at the same time, subjected to control
• The number of errors and fixes significantly decreases
• Every change is verified in terms of the safety of its implementation
• New functions are added to the system in a much simpler way
• The product is supervised during the development, deployment, and operation phases
• The project becomes much more flexible
• The system is under constant monitoring, making it possible to estimate its performance
• The organization's response to market changes is much faster and more effective with this methodology
• In case of malfunction, it's easier to diagnose which implementation is responsible for it
• Implementations are introduced frequently but on a small scale
• All processes are performed much faster
• Development and operations teams form a single integrated team

DevOps lifecycle: Lifecycle of a product in DevOps methodology

Thanks to the methodology and DevOps culture, a DevOps engineer can more effectively plan, program, implement, and develop products.

The system is created, tested, and continuously integrated during the development phase. The implementation phase involves, among other things, defining a version management process.

Stages of DevOps lifecycle

The DevOps lifecycle consists of a few stages.

Plan phase

During the planning stage, DevOps teams define and describe the features of a product in development, such as a web or mobile application. They monitor the progress of tasks from single-product tasks to multiple across many products. DevOps teams are responsible for creating backlogs, tracking bugs, and managing software development.

Development phase

The development phase focuses on writing, testing, reviewing, and integrating the code. It also involves transforming this code into build artifacts that can then be deployed into environments. The aim of DevOps teams is to innovate rapidly while maintaining high quality, stability, and productivity. To achieve that, they can automate repetitive tasks and iterate processes to handle them in a smaller form.

Delivery phase

The delivery phase consists of consistently and reliably deploying software into production environments. During this stage, teams define and determine the criteria for releases with clear approval rules. They can also create automated gates that move software from one stage to another. Thanks to automating this process, it's easier to scale and control it.

Operate phase

The operation phase is about maintaining, monitoring, and troubleshooting software in the production environment. Teams working according to DevOps practices try to deliver reliable and available software and reduce or eliminate downtime due to issues.

One of the main goals of DevOps is to allow development and operations teams to discover problems before they start to affect users and their experiences visibly.

DevOps in the Cloud

The cloud offers unique capabilities to teams working in the DevOps methodology. One benefit of cloud technology is that DevOps teams can now create and configure multiple cloud environments and safely deploy their applications there. This significantly reduced the costs related to buying, configuring, and maintaining physical servers. Currently, teams can configure cloud environments quickly and seamlessly and discard them when they're no longer needed.

Cloud computing also makes it easier to develop web and mobile applications by allowing development teams to focus less on the infrastructure itself. They can leave it in the hands of the cloud provider. Additionally, cloud computing improves security efforts by providing specialized security tools. Furthermore, the cloud offers the ability to create backups and retrieve them with just one click.

Challenges in implementing DevOps

Changes in production environments can be time-consuming and chaotic because this process usually involves configuring new environments and codebases.

Naturally, the process of adopting DevOps and how smoothly it goes depends on the team's experiences and capabilities. Some teams will be able to adapt faster than others, and they will need to get used to faster software development.

Furthermore, teams must learn how to monitor the entire process and its moving parts. You need to remember that the fluidity of work in the DevOps method depends on the efficient and effective work of responsible parties that need to stay well-communicated and report issues on an ongoing basis so that no delays occur.

These are just a few examples of problems that companies wanting to start using DevOps practices can encounter. They must decide whether these potential hurdles outweigh the benefits.

DevOps tools

When selecting the most suitable DevOps tools, you should look for software and platforms that allow you to enhance collaboration, automate processes, monitor, and deliver better applications.

Jira

Jira offers over 170 add-ons and integrations, creating an all-in-one tool. It provides templates for reports, scrum, kanban, and best practices. You can also find built-in roadmaps and create a timeline for your projects, allowing you to keep your team and stakeholders updated about any changes. The capability for creating workflows will help you craft a precise definition of "done" and speed up the delivery process.

Jira is available not only on desktop devices but also on iOS and Android.

GitHub

GitHub allows your company to use multiple tools within one platform, facilitating collaboration and communication. It offers access to native tools so that you can minimize context switching. Developers receive access to tools such as GitHub Actions, Workflows, and GitHub Actions Marketplace.

GitHub Actions enables DevOps teams to automate software delivery processes such as building, testing, and deploying.

Workflows help team members automate specific processes and tasks.

GitHub Actions Marketplace provides developers with a vast selection of tools and applications that simplify the software development process.

Furthermore, GitHub offers many tools that will streamline collaboration between teams, such as task lists, project tables, the option to attach videos to comments, and more.

Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps allows development, operations, and project management teams to work together in the cloud and on-premises. The platform provides maintenance-free operations, elastic scale, high-level security, and easy collaboration across domains. Furthermore, it offers services such as Azure Boards, Azure Repos, Azure Pipelines, Azure Tests Plans, and Azure Artifacts.

The collection of these services allows your company to track and plan work, access Git code repositories, automatically build, test, and deploy code, and create and share packages with the team.

Amazon AWS

Similar to Azure, Amazon AWS offers DevOps services in the cloud, simplifying the provision and management of infrastructure, deployment of code, automation of releases, and monitoring the performance of your products.

Amazon AWS offers DevOps tools such as Amazon Elastic Container Service, AWS Lambda, AWS OpsWorks, AWS Config, and more.