DevOps is a software development approach which focuses on complete software design to operations. It allows a single team to manage the entire application development life cycle, that is, development, testing, deployment, and monitoring. They take full ownership for the service.
Traditional Approaches
Traditional software development approaches mainly focused on software development only.Waterfall and Agile are the most popular.
- Waterfall model was focusing quality of the product and hence it took higher potion of the time to build the product and deliver as a whole.
- Then agile focused on delivering software faster and then improve quality of the product based on the user feedback.
Traditional Approaches had a clear separation between development and operations. This separation didn’t help the stakeholder getting the best product.
DevOps Methodology
With DevOps model, regardless of their organizational structure, have teams that view the entire development and infrastructure lifecycle as part of their responsibilities. This optimizes both the productivity of developers and the reliability of operations.
Traditional methods focused on how to create the software based on customer requirement. Devops has introduced another layer so that how to deliver and maintain the created software.
Benefits of DevOps
Speed: The DevOps model enables developers and operations teams to Move at high velocity so you can innovate for customers faster, adapt to changing markets better, and grow more efficient at driving business results. For example, microservices and continuous delivery let teams take ownership of services and then release updates quicker.
Reliability: Ensure the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes so you can reliably deliver at a more rapid pace. Use practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery to test that each change is functional and safe. Monitoring and logging practices help you stay informed of performance in real-time.
Scale: Operate and manage your infrastructure and development processes at scale. Automation and consistency help you manage complex or changing systems efficiently and with reduced risk. For example, infrastructure as code helps you manage your development, testing, and production environments in a repeatable and more efficient manner.
Improved Collaboration: Build more effective teams, Developers and operations teams collaborate closely, share many responsibilities, and combine their workflows. This reduces inefficiencies and saves time (e.g. reduced handover periods between developers and operations, writing code that takes into account the environment in which it is run).
Security: You can adopt a DevOps model without sacrificing security by using automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques. For example, using infrastructure as code and policy as code, you can define and then track compliance at scale.
DevOps Practices
There are a few key practices that help organizations innovate faster through automating and streamlining the software development and infrastructure management processes. Most of these practices are accomplished with proper tooling.
Very frequent but small updates allows organizations innovate faster for their customers. These updates are usually more incremental in nature than the occasional updates performed under traditional release practices. They help teams address bugs faster.
Microservices architecture allows applications more flexible and enable quicker innovation. decouples large, complex systems into simple, independent projects. To reduce the coordination overhead of updating applications, each service is paired with small, agile teams who take ownership of each service and hence organizations can move faster.
Combination of microservices and increased release frequency leads to significantly more deployments which can present operational challenges. Thus, DevOps practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery solve these issues and let organizations deliver rapidly in a safe and reliable manner.
Infrastructure automation practices, like infrastructure as code and configuration management, help to keep computing resources elastic and responsive to frequent changes.
The use of monitoring and logging helps engineers track the performance of applications and infrastructure so they can react quickly to problems.
DevOps Lifecycle
Stage 1: Continuous Development
This pace can be done using a traditional development methodology but the code base should be managed in a version control system(Ex: Git).
Stage 2: Continuous Integration
This is the core of DevOps life cycle. Developers require to commit changes to the source code more frequently, may be either on a daily or weekly basis.
This allows early detection of issues as code building and testing happens more frequently. it also includes code review, unit testing, integration testing, and packaging.
Tools used Ex: Jenkins
Stage 3: Continuous Testing
In This stage developed software is tested for bugs using automation testing tools. Business use-cases are focused thoroughly in this pace. Docker Containers are used for simulating the test environment.
Tools: Jenkins, Selenium TestNG, JUnit
Stage 4: Continuous Deployment
This is the stage where you deploy the code on the production servers.
Containerization tools help produce consistency across Development, Test, Staging as well as Production environments. It’s also helps in scaling.
Configuration Management maintains the configurations consistent across all the servers to meet functional and performance requirements.
Continuous Deployment Tools: Docker, Ansible
Stage 5: Continuous Monitoring
In This stage continuously monitor the performance of the application.
Tools Used: Splunk, ELK Stack, Nagios, New Relic
Keywords
Continuous integration is a software development practice where developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository, after which automated builds ,tests and images are created. The key goal is to reduce the time it takes to validate and release new updates. CI is focused on building the software rather running it on a server.
Continuous delivery is a software development practice where it expands continuous integration by automatically deploying all code changes to a testing environment and/or a production environment and testing. As a result developers will always have a deployment-ready build artifact that has passed through a standardized test process.
Microservices architecture is a design approach to build a single application as a set of small services. Each service runs in its own process and communicates with other typically using an HTTP. Microservices are built around business capabilities; each service is scoped to a single purpose. microservices can deploy independently, as a single service, or as a group of services.
Infrastructure as code is a practice in which infrastructure is provisioned and managed using code and software development techniques, such as version control and continuous integration. This avoids manually setting up and configuring resources and use use standardized patterns,
Further reading:
https://www.edureka.co/blog/what-is-devops/
https://aws.amazon.com/devops/what-is-devops/