DevOps Introduction

What is DevOps?

DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support.

DevOps is a software development method that focuses on communication, integration, and collaboration among IT professionals to enables the rapid deployment of products.

DevOps is a culture that promotes collaboration between Development and Operations Team. This allows deploying code to production faster and in an automated way. It helps to increases an organization’s speed to deliver application and services. It can be defined as an alignment of development and IT operation.

Why DevOps?

DevOps allows Agile Development Teams to implement Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. This helps them to launch products faster into the market.

Important reasons for adopting DevOps are

1. Predictability: DevOps offers a significantly lower failure rate of new releases

2. Reproducibility: Version everything so that earlier version can be restored anytime.

3. Maintainability: Effortless process of recovery in the event of a new release crashing or disabling the current system.

4. Time to market: DevOps reduces the time to market up to 50% through streamlined software delivery. This is particularly the case for digital and mobile applications.

5. Greater Quality: DevOps helps the team to provide improved quality of application development as it incorporates infrastructure issues.

6. Reduced Risk: DevOps incorporates security aspects in the software delivery lifecycle. It helps in the reduction of defects across the lifecycle.

7. Resiliency: The Operational state of the software system is more stable, secure, and changes are auditable.

8. Cost Efficiency: DevOps offers cost efficiency in the software development process which is always an aspiration of IT companies’ management.

9. Breaks larger code base into small pieces: DevOps is based on the agile programming method. Therefore, it allows breaking larger code bases into smaller and manageable chunks.

DevOps vs Traditional IT

Parameter	Agile	DevOps
What is it?	Agile refers to an iterative approach which focuses on collaboration, customer feedback, and small, rapid releases.	DevOps is considered a practice of bringing development and operations teams together.
Purpose	Agile helps to manage complex projects.	DevOps central concept is to manage end-to-end engineering processes.
Task	Agile process focusses on constant changes.	DevOps focuses on constant testing and delivery.
Implementation	Agile method can be implemented within a range of tactical frameworks like a sprint, safe and scrum.	The primary goal of DevOps is to focus on collaboration, so it doesn’t have any commonly accepted framework.
Team skill set	Agile development emphasizes training all team members to have a wide variety of similar and equal skills.	DevOps divides and spreads the skill set between the development and operation teams.
Team size	Small Team is at the core of Agile. As smaller is the team, the fewer people on it, the faster they can move.	Relatively larger team size as it involves all the stack holders.
Duration	Agile development is managed in units of “sprints.” This time is much less than a month for each sprint.	DevOps strives for deadlines and benchmarks with major releases. The ideal goal is to deliver code to production DAILY or every few hours.
Feedback	Feedback is given by the customer.	Feedback comes from the internal team.
Target Areas	Software Development	End-to-end business solution and fast delivery.
Shift-Left Principles	Leverage shift-left	Leverage both shifts left and right.
Emphasis	Agile emphasizes on software development methodology for developing software. When the software is developed and released, the agile team will not care what happens to it.	DevOps is all about taking software which is ready for release and deploying it in a reliable and secure manner.
Cross-functional	Any team member should be able to do what’s required for the progress of the project. Also, when each team member can perform every job, it increases understanding and bonding between them.	In DevOps, development teams and operational teams are separate. So, communication is quite complex.
Communication	Scrum is most common methods of implementing Agile software development. Daily scrum meeting is carried out.	DevOps communications involve specs and design documents. It’s essential for the operational team to fully understand the software release and its hardware/network implications for adequately running the deployment process.
Documentation	Agile method is to give priority to the working system over complete documentation. It is ideal when you’re flexible and responsive. However, it can hurt when you’re trying to turn things over to another team for deployment.	In the DevOps, process documentation is foremost because it will send the software to the operational team for deployment. Automation minimizes the impact of insufficient documentation. However, in the development of complex software, it’s difficult to transfer all the knowledge required.
Automation	Agile doesn’t emphasize on automation. Though it helps.	Automation is the primary goal of DevOps. It works on the principle to maximize efficiency when deploying software.
Goal	It addresses the gap between customer need and development & testing teams.	It addresses the gap between development + testing and Ops.
Focus	It focuses on functional and non-function readiness.	It focuses more on operational and business readiness.
Importance	Developing software is inherent to Agile.	Developing, testing and implementation all are equally important.
Speed vs. Risk	Teams using Agile support rapid change, and a robust application structure.	In the DevOps method, the teams must make sure that the changes which are made to the architecture never develop a risk to the entire project.
Quality	Agile produces better applications suites with the desired requirements. It can easily adapt according to the changes made on time, during the project life.	DevOps, along with automation and early bug removal, contributes to creating better quality. Developers need to follow Coding and Architectural best practices to maintain quality standards.
Tools used	JIRA, Bugzilla, Kanboard are some popular Agile tools.	Puppet, Chef, TeamCity OpenStack, AWS are popular DevOps tools.
Challenges	The agile method needs teams to be more productive which is difficult to match every time.	DevOps process needs to development, testing and production environments to streamline work.
Advantage	Agile offers shorter development cycle and improved defect detection.	DevOps supports Agile’s release cycle.

Conclusion

• DevOps is a software development method which focuses on communication, integration, and collaboration among IT professionals.
• Agile software development method emphasis on iterative, incremental, and evolutionary development.
• Agile refers to an iterative approach which focuses on collaboration, customer feedback, and small, rapid releases.
• DevOps consider as a practice of bringing development and operations teams together.
• Agile method is to give priority to the working system over complete documentation. It is ideal when you’re flexible and responsive.
• In the DevOps, process documentation is foremost because it will send the software to the operational team for deployment.

DevOps Lifecycle

DevOps establish the agile relationship between development and operation. The various phases like Continues Development, Continues Integration, Continues Delivery, Continues Development, Continues Testing, Continuous Monitoring, etc are part of DevOps lifecycle.

Continuous Development: This is the first phase of SDLC, and DevOps life-cycle.
Continuous Integration: In this phase, developer keep pushing their code to centralized repository.
Continuous Testing: After code is Integrated and build is generated, its time to Test the code.
Continuous Monitoring:
Continuous Feedback:
Continuous Deployment:
Continuous Operations:

DevOps Work-flow

Containers allows a developer to package up an application with all of the dependency it needs like runtime, libraries, and artifacts. Container ship it all out as one package.

DevOps Principles

Containers allows a developer to package up an application with all of the dependency it needs like runtime, libraries, and artifacts. Container ship it all out as one package.

DevOps Tools

Infrastructure Automation

Configuration Management

Deployment Automation

Performance Management

Log Management

Monitoring

DevOps Best Practices

Based on Agile Manifesto

Source and Version Control in DevOps

Automation in DevOps

Small increments of Deliveries in DevOps

Collaboration in DevOps Teams

Develop Collaboration in DevOps Teams

DevOps CI/CD/CT

Continuous Integration in DevOps

Continuous Delivery in DevOps

Continuous Deployment in DevOps

Continuous Testing in DevOps

DevOps Configuration Management

Configuration Management in DevOps Practices

Release Management in DevOps

Application Performance Monitoring in DevOps

DevOps Enterprise Solutions

AWS DevOps Solutions

IBM Cloud DevOps Solutions

Google Cloud DevOps Solutions

Azure DevOps Solutions