DevOps Explained
More than a decade ago, the development team would be combined of developers who code and operations who know the infrastructure and implementation process.
But when it comes to software delivery, it’s been very often to face a slower pace or conflict on the way. What would be the main problem? Well, most probably the lack of communication between the abovementioned roles. Making sure that good quality and fully tested code will be deployed to production is the reason why DevOps was born. To automate the delivery of new code from the point it is pushed until it gets to the customers.
Long story short, DevOps is a way of thinking, not an individual role. It is a process which every modern and agile company makes use of.
DevOps Pillars
Automation
The key principle of DevOps is “automate everything”. This is crucial if the goal is to achieve delivery of high quality and value through frequent and fast releases. The purpose of the automation is to streamline the DevOps lifecycle by reducing manual workload which will significantly reduce human errors.
Infrastructure as Code
Modern process of provisioning and managing infrastructure in public cloud be defined through code, instead going via a manual process. It goes through a set of editable text files that show how and where infrastructure resource configurations are deployed.
CI/CD
CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery and ensures incremental code changes to be delivered quickly through the most efficient method.
This coding philosophy drives the DevOps team to frequently implement minor code changes and do checkups into a version control repository with a consistent mechanism to integrate and verify changes. CI/CD requires continuous testing in a set of automated regression and performance tests are executed in the CI/CD pipeline. The consistent integration process encourages the developers’ team to commit code changes more often, which leads to better code quality.
It is an essential part of DevOps and its features that can significantly decrease development complexity and improve the organization’s productivity and efficiency.
Microservices
As a foundation of modern software development practices, the microservices allow organizations to deploy cloud-based applications as independent services. It is an architectural style that allows for developing an application as a compilation of multiple services instead of developing a single one. With the ability to work with the same toolset for development and operation, the microservices increase DevOps productivity.
Monitoring
Continuous monitoring (CM) comes at the end of the DevOps process. It’s identifying any potential threat to the security and compliance rules of a software development cycle and/or the architecture. It is an automated procedure that helps businesses and technical teams to determine and solve crucial issues right away. The software is usually sent for production before the continuous monitoring is conducted and all the relevant teams get notified about the errors detected during the production period.
The Benefits
• Increase of the delivery speed enabled by CI/CD pipelines
• Improved collaboration between developers and operations teams
• No more long and tense integrations
• Increase visibility enabling greater communication
• Early detection of issues
• Less time debugging and more time adding features
• Reduced integration problems allowing for delivering software more rapidly
• Improved organization’s competitiveness
DevOps represents a big change in the IT world and culture.
Developers and sys admins start supporting each other. Companies are happy because they get better performing software products and services to offer to their clients.
If you are looking for a challenging DevOps career, explore our job openings and join us!