DevOps

What is DevOps?

DevOps is the combination of the Development and Operations arms of an app or software development process.

It is an active practice of the best principles of development so as to enhance the overall quality of the finished product while optimizing resource use and development times. DevOps encompasses an optimized app development culture.

Core Principles of DevOps

Four key principles in DevOps practice enable the effective and efficient development of applications.

1. Automation

This principle drives the automation of various aspects of the software development lifecycle, for example, testing, builds, releases, and other manual tasks.

Automation seeks to speed up the processes that take up time during the development processes and can be accelerated using smart, autonomous systems.

2. Collaboration

In addition to automation, DevOps principles also encourage collaboration between various development teams.

It establishes a free flow of information between professionals working on the same build, eliminating delays occurring due to lack of or improper communication.

DevOps also involves implementing effective communication loops between teams.

3. CI/CD

Continuous improvement and continuous deployment, also known as CI/CD, is a core method ingrained in DevOps that involves continuously enhancing the performance of a build while deploying the progressive builds.

This drastically shortens the release time of each new upgrade and ensures that it is better than the last.

4. Feedback

DevOps principles involve shorter feedback loops that enable developers to gather insight into app performance.

It further propels the CI/CD functions of DevOps by guiding the further improvement of the app by highlighting bugs, glitches, and user-requested features for the app.

Four Phases of DevOps

The modern DevOps that enterprises leverage for enhancing their outputs evolved in four unique phases, starting with the most nascent version leading up to a complex and automated process:

Phase 1: Bring Your Own DevOps

In its budding stages, each software development team brought its own tools and implements to develop software.

This created hurdles during teamwork because of the disparity in toolsets and methods used, ultimately causing the results to suffer.

Phase 2: Best-in-Class DevOps

To eliminate the problems caused by the disparity in the tools and methods used by their software teams, enterprises proceed to standardize these aspects for each stage of development.

However, this created the challenge of importing the software changes across each tool used in each stage of development.

Phase 3: Do-it-yourself DevOps

To address the challenges that software changes caused in the DevOps cycles, enterprises introduced the Do-it-yourself technique.

In this method, a lot of custom work could be executed to make all the tools and solutions align with the same goal.

As all the solutions were custom-created, it posed problems with integrating the solutions into main enterprise systems.

Phase 4: DevOps Platforms

The final stage of DevOps is in the form of DevOps platforms that integrate all the functions and processes of the culture into one platform.

The same set of tools, rules, and workflows are available to all teams across the enterprise, eliminating challenges and inefficiencies that earlier phases presented.

Benefits of DevOps

DevOps culture provides organizations with several benefits:

It helps eliminate institutional siloes within application development workflows and processes by unifying the operations and integrating all elements.

It promotes collaboration and teamwork without the associated inefficiencies of communication delays or version control problems. It helps accelerate the development process drastically.

It fosters a proactive culture towards application development, which helps anticipate the path of development and prepare ahead.