Starsoft
Two teams (departments) are the backbone of software development; the development team and the operations team.
How do they work?
The development team is responsible for designing and developing the software from scratch.
The operations team is responsible for implementing the design developed by the development team. The operations team would then observe any errors or bugs and report back to the development team to resolve these bugs.
With this feedback, the development team would work again to fix bugs or errors and then transfer back to the operations team to implement the newly corrected software.
This process of resolving and implementation goes on back and forth and sometimes takes a long period before the software project is finished.
This may result in prolonged project duration and even extended deadlines for the project.
To combat this issue, the DevOps approach was developed. With this approach, the two teams can work together to improve the quality of the results generated without prolonging/ extending beyond the required duration for the project.
So, what is the DevOps approach?
DevOps combines the two teams that form the backbone of software development; “Dev” for the development team and “Ops” for the operations team.
DevOps is a cultural approach to working on tasks in a company that promotes collaboration between the development team and the operations team. This approach is implemented to join these two teams to provide value to the clients/customers continually.
DevOps is also regarded as a set of principles that sees software development through building stages from analysis to coding to testing to building to deployment and finally, monitoring.
The DevOps team is concerned with the entire application lifecycle, from inception to its completion or maintenance stage, without having to transfer software applications from one group to another. Here, the DevOps team handles all the software development processes.
What are the DevOps principles?
The DevOps approach establishes the following principles:
- Collaborative responsibility
- Customer-centric activity
- Continuous software improvement
- Software automation
Collaborative responsibility
The main tenet that the DevOps approach builds is the cooperative collaboration between the development team and the operations team. The two groups, with originally different functions, now come together as a single team to achieve the desired result.
The teams foster a cross-functional relationship where they communicate, share feedback, and resolve any errors throughout the entire development and deployment process.
They now have end-to-end responsibilities to see the project from conception to completion.
Customer-centric activity
The DevOps approach establishes a customer-centric principle, where everything regarding software development is about the end-users. To ensure this, a short workable feedback loop should be established between the DevOps team and the end-users.
This process enables rapid feedback retrieval and integration into the developing software to create the desired result that meets customers’ needs.
The process also ensures that the Developers get a feel of the users’ experience from using the software to improve the software as they deem fit.
Continuous software improvement
Software development isn’t complete even after deployment because it still needs constant maintenance and improvement.
Technological advancements and customer needs changes should constantly and continuously be reflected in the software to increase the software’s value to the customers.
This DevOps principle encourages experimentation, waste minimization, and optimization for speed to improve and promote the software’s continual efficiency.
Software automation
Automation of the software development process helps the team deliver the software to the end-users easily.
It allows for continuous integration and deployment of the software with as little time and effort as required, mostly with repetitive tasks. With the time saved, the DevOps team now has enough time to develop new features and improve the software.
DevOps practices
There are five basic practices that DevOps operates with. These practices are continuous, i.e., once it gets to the final phase, it returns to the initial stage and starts all over again.
These DevOps practices include:
- Development
- Testing
- Integration
- Deployment
- Monitoring
Development
Under development, the practices include gathering, planning, analysis, and coding of the project that is being worked on. This kickstarts the beginning of the DevOps approach to software development.
Testing
This practice involves continuous testing of newly developed and updated codes regarding the software. This process is repetitive through the DevOps cycle and, as a result, is usually automated to save time and effort.
Integration
There is a continuous and rapid feedback loop between testing and development, and any resolution of bugs or correction is integrated into this process into the software.
Deployment
When new features or development and code changes are made for the software, this process ensures fast deployment (mostly automated) for customer use so that feedback can be immediately retrieved.
Monitoring
This practice is the last one in the cycle, after which it returns to the development process. It involves constant and continuous monitoring of the software in the users’ hands to enable continuous updating of the users’ needs and any technological advancements.
It also checks for bugs or issues that could be bothering the software. Any notice confirmed in this phase would then be transferred back to the development phase, and the process starts from there again.
Benefits of DevOps
Various benefits come with using the DevOps approach in software development. The benefits include:
Reduced complexity
The complexity experienced when the development team works separately from the operations team is. The two groups can now address their concerns and differences together, creating a stabilized working space for the teams.
Faster issue resolution
Any problems encountered can be easily resolved amongst the teams as there won’t be any need for transfer of documents from one department to the other or waiting on one department since it can now be done in just one space.
Faster deployment
The faster the DevOps team develops, tests, and integrates codes into the software, the faster it is for the software to be deployed in the market for customers’ use.
It saves time and effort
Implementing automation for repetitive tasks in DevOps saves time, and effort is used for other productive tasks in software development.
Better product delivery
Seamless interaction, communication, and collaboration between both teams to form the DevOps team reflect in the product they are currently working on positively as. They now gather knowledge and intuitions to release a better product for customers’ use.
Better resource utilization
The team can develop ways to better utilize the available resources together instead of dividing them.
DevOps Tools
There are various DevOps-friendly tools for each process in the DevOps approach. These tools are excellent for implementing these DevOps practices in software development. They include:
- Planning: Jira, Git
- Coding: Stash, Gitlab, Git Hub
- Building: Maven, Ansible, Chef, Docker, J Frog, Gradle
- Testing: Selenium, Codeception, Vagrant, TestNG
- Deploying: Puppet, OpenS tack, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Ansible, OpenShift.
- Operating: Powershell, Puppet, Ansible, Otter, Chef
- Monitor: Slack, Grafana, Splunt, Nagios, Datadog, New Relic
Who is a DevOps engineer?
A DevOps engineer is the overseer of coding and engineering in software development. A DevOps performs the following functions:
- Keeps track of code modifications
- Oversees new and updated code releases
- Connect and integrate application components and elements
- Monitor and comment on the release of new features in the software.