DevOps is an evolving philosophy and framework that encourages faster, better application development and faster release of new or revised software features or products to customers.
The practice of DevOps encourages smoother, continuous communication, collaboration, integration, visibility, and transparency between application development teams (Dev) and their IT operations team (Ops) counterparts.
This closer relationship between “Dev” and “Ops” permeates every phase of the DevOps lifecycle: from initial software planning to code, build, test, and release phases and on to deployment, operations, and ongoing monitoring. This relationship propels a continuous customer feedback loop of further improvement, development, testing, and deployment. One result of these efforts can be the more rapid, continual release of necessary feature changes or additions.
Some people group DevOps goals into four categories: culture, automation, measurement, and sharing (CAMS), and DevOps tools can aid in these areas. These tools can make development and operations workflows more streamlined and collaborative, automating previously time-consuming, manual, or static tasks involved in integration, development, testing, deployment, or monitoring.
Why Does it matter?
Along with its efforts to break down barriers to communication and collaboration between development and IT operations teams, a core value of DevOps is customer satisfaction and the faster delivery of value. DevOps is also designed to propel business innovation and the drive for continuous process improvement.
The practice of DevOps encourages faster, better, more secure delivery of business value to an organization’s end customers. This value might take the form of more frequent product releases, features, or updates. It can involve how quickly a product release or new feature gets into customers’ hands -all with the proper levels of quality and security. Or, it might focus on how quickly an issue or bug is identified, and then resolved and re-released.
Underlying infrastructure also supports DevOps with seamless performance, availability, and reliability of software as it is first developed and tested then released into production.
Benefits of DevOps:
DevOps proponents describe several business and technical benefits, many of which can result in happier customers. Some benefits of DevOps include:
- Faster, better product delivery
- Faster issue resolution and reduced complexity
- Greater scalability and availability
- More stable operating environments
- Better resource utilization
- Greater automation
- Greater visibility into system outcomes
- Greater innovation
DevOps Toolchain:
Followers of DevOps practices often use certain DevOps-friendly tools as part of their DevOps “toolchain.” The goal of these tools is to further streamline, shorten, and automate the various stages of the software delivery workflow (or “pipeline”). Many such tools also promote core DevOps tenets of automation, collaboration, and integration between development and operations teams. The following shows a sample of tools used at various DevOps lifecycle stages.
Plan
. This phase helps define business value and requirements. Sample tools include Jira or Git to help track known issues and perform project management.
Code.
This phase involves software design and the creation of software code. Sample tools include GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or Stash.
Build.
In this phase, you manage software builds and versions, and use automated tools to help compile and package code for future release to production. You use source code repositories or package repositories that also “package” infrastructure needed for product release. Sample tools include Docker, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Gradle, Maven, or JFrog Artifactory.
Test.
This phase involves continuous testing (manual or automated) to ensure optimal code quality. Sample tools include JUnit, Codeception, Selenium, Vagrant, TestNG, or BlazeMeter.
Deploy. This phase can include tools that help manage, coordinate, schedule, and automate product releases into production. Sample tools include Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Jenkins, Kubernetes, OpenShift, OpenStack, Docker, or Jira.
Operate.
This phase manages software during production. Sample tools include Ansible, Puppet, PowerShell, Chef, Salt, or Otter.
Monitor.
This phase involves identifying and collecting information about issues from a specific software release in production. Sample tools include New Relic, Datadog, Grafana, Wireshark, Splunk, Nagios, or Slack.
Top comments (0)