Introduction to DevOps: Culture and Practices#

DevOps is a set of practices that combine software development (Dev) and information technology operations (Ops) to shorten the software delivery life cycle. The main goal of DevOps is to increase efficiency and improve communication between these two silos. DevOps culture is about trust, collaboration, and automation.

Introduction#

Previously, if you intended to start an application business, you needed some components:

  • physical servers (various tiers based on your organizational needs),

  • network, storage, power, and cooling services,

  • a development team that creates the code for your software,

  • an operational team to control and take care of your infrastructure.

The Devs team would write your application and give it to the Ops. They would deploy your app and deal with dependencies all manually on the servers. When your company grew, these manual releases would create problems such as:

  • heavy workload,

  • decreased quality and bugs,

  • slow deployment times,

  • increasing configuration times and outages.

DevOps changed this whole process. In this blog, we are going to give a brief introduction to what DevOps is and the benefits of being a DevOps organization.

DevOps: Culture#

Although Agile changed software engineering in several ways, it couldn’t overcome the disagreement between developers and operations professionals.

Andrew Clay Shafer and Patrick Debois, 2008, organized Belgium’s first DevOpsDays event to foster a better, more agile method of software development and address the issues between Dev and Ops teams.

DevOps is about being agile, efficient, and innovative. It is the collaboration of individuals, methods, and products to help ongoing delivery to your customers. Its main focus is on people. The phrase “DevOps” refers to the partnership between development (which is abbreviated as “Dev”) and operations teams (Ops). This collaboration produces extra value and competitive power in marketing.

The DevOps Advantage#

DevOps is a collection of techniques. It is also an expansion of agile techniques such as Scrum, and XP. Since you regularly merge code and make commits a lot of times in a single day, you ensure that your app is always ready for release. This process is also known as continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD Pipeline).

In DevOps, teams from multiple backgrounds come together for one goal: to increase the value of the product in the best possible and quickest way. All teams collaborate with a customer-centric mindset.

Agile methods are incorporated both into the production and deployment phases. You monitor and address system problems quickly. Some benefits of DevOps are as follows:

  • increased the number of monthly features given

  • reduced lead times

  • fewer manufacturing mishaps

  • decreased expenses and downtime

Four pillars of DevOps#

The main values of DevOps are culture, automation, measurement, and sharing (which can also be shortened as “CAMS”). These concepts are essential to the overall stability of the architecture.

culture: Culture is about modifying the conventions that your teams follow. The sort of cultural difficulties you have determines cultural transformations.

automation: Devops prioritizes making tiny, incremental adjustments to allow for faster review and ongoing improvement. The operations team automates the product, revises the framework, and implements the code.

metrics You can use metrics to decide if something is functional. You can also utilize metrics to reinforce assessing methods of your systems.

sharing: Collaboration is core to DevOps. You also learn by observing and recording your techniques.

Organizational Advantages of Being DevOps#

Some advantages of being DevOps in an enterprise are as follows:

  • Improved team cooperation and connection.

  • Shorter manufacturing lead times result in improved performance and end-user satisfaction.

  • IaC reduces infrastructure expenses. Repetitive cycles decrease application faults and provide automation solutions. It also reduces or eliminates manual activities. Overall, it saves significant time and allows teams to focus more on building functionality.

  • DevOps allows for quick incident recovery. Through greater coordination, DevOps teams achieve faster resolutions through greater coordination thanks to open accessibility, shared learning, and improved performance monitoring. The collaboration between all teams separate teams results in improved implementation quality, agility, and speed.

Summary#

The goal of DevOps is to provide a unified system for the development and operation of applications. To participate in a competitive industry, businesses must act swiftly, take risks, and operate at a low cost.

You can benefit from DevOps by producing new versions of your software, testing them, and deploying them to clients in a matter of hours. DevOps focuses on delivering better goods to consumers in an agile environment. A successful DevOps plan achieves a product in a faster and more effective way.

See also

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