Introduction to DevOps

Considering most if not all companies are aiming to develop and deploy new software quickly, DevOps is an indispensable concept.

Research indicates that 77% of companies have already adopted the DevOps culture and worth mentioning, is, this figure is expected to increase significantly.

With these intriguing statistics, you will not go wrong in adding DevOps to your tools list.

1. What's DevOps

DevOps, a combination of development (Dev) and IT operations (ops) is a set of practices, tools, and cultural practices that are geared to streamline the software delivery process at a high velocity.

Activities such as automation, collaboration, and iterative development are highly emphasized in DevOps. These activities begin with planning, code development all through testing, deployment, and monitoring.

2. Key Principles of DevOps

DevOps has a set of principles that are geared to enhance automation, collaboration, and continuous improvement across the development and operations teams.

Some of these principles include:

• Automation

DevOps aims at automating repetitive tasks such as code integration and deployment, testing, and monitoring to facilitate faster processes and frequent releases.

• Continous Integration(CI)

Practicing continuous integration in DevOps allows developers to frequently merge their changes into a single repository. Before the merging, unit tests are ran detecting errors early on making it less expensive to fix them

• Continous Deployment(CD)

Continuous deployment involves automatically building and deploying all code changes to the production environment after running a series of automated tests.

Automation is heavily relied on in continuous deployment which helps achieve frequent updates in the production environment.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Infrastructure as Code provides an organized way for managing and provisioning the infrastructure through code instead of a manual way.

Configuration files for Infrastructure components such as operating systems, databases, and storage are created and versioned making it easy to edit and distribute.

• Collaboration

DevOps culture emphasizes on teamwork across the development and operations teams instead of having them 'siloed'.
As a result, the team can leverage each other's strengths which breaks barriers and improving innovation.

3. DevOps Lifecycle

DevOps lifecycle incorporates various activities involved in the development, testing, deployment, and maintenance of software.

Typically an infinite loop is used to represent DevOps lifecycle because of the continuous and iterative nature of DevOps practices.

Even though specific DevOps stages may vary depending on the organization's culture, the following stages are common in a typical DevOps lifecycle:

1. Plan

In this initial stage, the project requirements, goals, and timelines are developed to optimize the business impact.

Various resources are allocated while the communications channels are established. Jira is a common tool used in DevOps planning

2. Code

In this stage, developers write and review code to implement the business solution created in the planning stage.

Typically, the agile approach is used during this stage while tools like Git and Bitbucket come in handy in keeping track of the changes made in the code

3. Build

Next, the source code from the coding stage is converted into a form that can be executed by a computer.

To create the executable artifact, the source code is integrated, compiled, and packaged along with the necessary dependencies.

Some of the tools used in the Build stage of the DevOps lifecycle are Apache Maven, Gradle, and Ant.

4. Test

Software testing involves checking the right product was built (Verification) and the product was built in the right way(Validation).

Various tests such as unit, component integration, system integration, and user acceptance testing are done using tools such as Junit, Cypress, Selenium, Jmeter, and pytest.

5. Release

In the release stage, a build that consists of all dependencies is prepared to be deployed using tools such as Gradle are used in this stage

6. Deploy

In this stage, the application is made available to the users. A continuous deployment strategy is commonly utilized to allow frequent automated deployments in the production environment.

Some of the tools used in the DevOps deployment stage are GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Gitlab CI/CD, CicrleCI, and TravisCI.

7. Operate

The operations team manages the deployed applications to ensure they are constantly available, secure, and reliable by looking at various things like system logs, metrics, and user interactions.

Configuration management such as Ansible, Chef, and Puppet are used to configure and manage applications and servers

8. Monitor

Continuous monitoring helps the team identify bottlenecks in the production environment to help maintain a healthy and good infrastructure.

Various tools are used to detect anomalies, gather data, analyze logs and metrics, and troubleshoot the systems to keep them optimized.

Tools like Grafana, Prometheus, and Splunk are used during this stage of the DevOps lifecycle

4. Benefits and Challenges of DevOps

Atlassian DevOps Trends Survey shows that 99% of the participant's organizations had significantly benefited after adopting DevOps culture.

Some of the DevOps benefits are:

• Speed: The software building and testing processes are automated which makes it to frequently deliver DevOps releases.

• Frequent deployments As a result of the frequent releases DevOps teams quickly push their change to the production environment which is a competitive advantage when fixing bugs are implementing new features.

• Improved code Quality DevOps embraces shift left testing. Hence bugs are detected early which not only improves code quality but also makes it cheaper to fix

• Improved collaborations By having the development and operations as a single entity, communications across the team are significantly improved which results in better innovations

Conclusion

In conclusion, DevOps is a practice and set of tools that empower the development and operations team to deliver reliable and quality customer solutions quickly.

By embracing automation, continuous integration and deployment, collaboration, and Infrastructure as Code, many organizations have benefited after adopting DevOps.