A lot has happened since the term DevOps took root in the IT world. With so much of the ecosystem open source, it's important to rethink why it started and what it means for a career in IT.
What is DevOps
While there is no single definition, I believe that DevOps is a technology framework that enables interaction between development teams and operations teams to deploy code to production environments faster, with repeatable steps and automation. We will spend the rest of the article on unpacking this statement.
The word "DevOps" is a concatenation of the words "development" and "operations". DevOps helps increase the speed of delivery of applications and services. This enables organizations to effectively serve their customers and become more competitive in the marketplace. Simply put, DevOps is about consistency between development and IT operations with more effective communication and collaboration.
DevOps envisions a culture in which collaboration between development teams, operators and business teams is considered critical. It's not just about tools, because DevOps in an organization continually benefits customers as well. Tools are one of its pillars, along with people and processes. DevOps empowers organizations to deliver high quality solutions in the shortest possible time. DevOps also automates all processes, from build to deployment, application or product.
The DevOps discussion focuses on the relationship between developers, the people who write software for life, and the operators responsible for maintaining that software.
Challenges for the development team
Developers tend to be enthusiastic and willing to introduce new approaches and technologies to solve organizational problems. However, they also face certain problems:
- The competitive market creates a lot of pressure to deliver the product on time.
- They must take care of managing production-ready code and introducing new features.
- The release cycle can be long, so the development team has to make several assumptions before deploying applications. In such a scenario, more time is needed to solve the problems that arise during deployment in a production or test environment.
Challenges facing the operations team
Operating teams have historically focused on the stability and reliability of IT services. That is why operational teams seek stability through changes to resources, technologies, or approaches. Their tasks include:
- Managing resource allocation as demand grows.
- Handle design or customization changes required to be applied in a production environment.
- Diagnose and troubleshoot production-related issues after self-deploying applications.
How DevOps Solves Development and Operations Challenges
Instead of rolling out a large number of application functions at the same time, companies are trying to figure out if they can deploy a small number of functions for their customers through a series of release iterations. This approach has several advantages, such as better software quality, faster customer feedback, etc. This, in turn, ensures a high degree of customer satisfaction. To achieve these goals, companies are required to:
- Reduce bounce rate for new releases
- Increase deployment frequency
- Achieve a faster average recovery time in the event of a new release of the application.
- Reduce time for corrections
DevOps accomplishes all of these tasks and helps ensure uninterrupted supply. Organizations are using DevOps to achieve levels of performance that were unthinkable just a few years ago. They perform tens, hundreds and even thousands of deployments per day, while ensuring world-class reliability, stability and security. (Learn more about batch sizes and their impact on software delivery).
DevOps attempts to address a variety of issues arising from past methodologies, including:
- Isolation of development teams and operators
- Testing and deployment as separate phases, performed after design and assembly and requiring more time than assembly cycles.
- , -
- ,
- ,
DevOps, Agile IT
DevOps is often discussed in connection with other IT practices, in particular, a flexible and waterfall IT infrastructure.
Agile is a set of principles, values, and methods for producing software. So, for example, if you have an idea that you want to transform into software, you can use Agile principles and values. But this software can only run in a development or testing environment. You need a simple and safe way to quickly and with high repeatability transfer software to the production environment, and the path lies through the DevOps tools and methods. Agile software development focuses on development processes, while DevOps is responsible for development and deployment in the safest and most reliable way.
Comparing the traditional waterfall model to DevOps is a good way to understand the benefits of DevOps. The following example assumes that the application will be up and running in four weeks, development is 85% complete, the application will be up and running, and the process of purchasing servers to submit code has just begun.
| Traditional processes | Processes in DevOps |
|---|---|
| After placing an order for new servers, the development team is working on testing. The task force is working on the extensive documentation that enterprises need to deploy infrastructure. | After placing an order for new servers, development and operator teams work together on the processes and workflow for installing the new servers. This allows for a better understanding of the infrastructure requirements.
|
| , , , , . | , , , . |
| . .
|
The operational team is fully aware of the progress made by the development team. She also interacts with the development team and they jointly develop a monitoring plan that meets the IT and business needs. They also use application performance monitoring (APM) tools.
|
| A stress test before launching an application causes the application to crash, which delays its launch. | A stress test performed before starting an application degrades performance. The development team quickly removes bottlenecks and the app launches on time. |
DevOps lifecycle
DevOps involves adopting certain generally accepted practices.
Continuous planning
Continuous planning relies on lean principles to start small by identifying the resources and outputs needed to validate business value or vision, continually adapt, measure progress, learn from customer needs, change direction as needed with agility, and renew business plan.
Joint development
The collaborative development process allows businesses, development teams, and testers distributed across different time zones to continuously deliver quality software. This includes multi-platform development, support for programming in different languages, creating user stories, developing ideas and managing the life cycle. Collaborative development includes a continuous integration process and practice, which contributes to frequent code integration and automatic assembly. With frequent code injection, integration issues are identified early in the lifecycle (when they are easier to fix), and overall integration efforts are reduced through continuous feedback as the project shows continuous and visible progress.
Continuous testing
Continuous testing reduces the cost of testing by helping development teams balance speed and quality. It also removes test bottlenecks through service virtualization and makes it easy to create virtualized test environments that can be easily shared, deployed, and updated as systems change. These capabilities reduce the cost of initializing and maintaining test environments, and also reduce test cycle times by allowing integration testing early in the life cycle.
Continuous release and deployment
These techniques bring with them one of the core practices: continuous release and deployment. This provides a continuous conveyor that automates key processes. It reduces manual steps, resource latency, and rework by enabling deployments at the push of a button, resulting in more releases, fewer bugs, and complete transparency.
Automation plays a key role in ensuring a stable and reliable software release. One of the biggest challenges is to adopt and automate manual processes such as build, regression, deployment, and infrastructure. This requires source code version control; test and deployment scripts; infrastructure and application configuration data; as well as the libraries and packages on which the application depends. Another important factor is the ability to query the state of all environments.
Continuous monitoring
Continuous monitoring delivers enterprise-grade reports that help development teams understand the availability and performance of applications in a production environment before they are deployed to production. Early feedback, provided by continuous monitoring, is critical to reducing the cost of errors and steering projects in the right direction. This practice often includes monitoring tools, which typically reveal metrics related to application performance.
Constant feedback and optimization
Continuous feedback and optimization provide a visual representation of the flow of customers and accurate identification of problem areas. Feedback can be included in both the pre-sale and post-production stages to maximize value and ensure the successful completion of even more transactions. All of this provides an immediate visualization of the root cause of customer problems that affect their behavior and impact on the business.
Benefits of DevOps
DevOps can help create an environment in which developers and operators work as a team to achieve common goals. An important milestone in this process is the introduction of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI / CD). These techniques will enable teams to get software to market faster with fewer bugs.
Important benefits of DevOps are:
- Predictability: DevOps offers a significantly lower bounce rate when releasing new releases.
- Maintainability: DevOps provides easy recovery in the event of a new release failure or application outage.
- Reproducibility: An assembly or code revision control system allows you to restore earlier versions as needed.
- Higher quality: Solving infrastructure problems improves the quality of application development.
- : 50%.
- : .
- : .
- : , , .
- : DevOps , .
DevOps
The adoption of DevOps spawned several principles that have evolved (and continue to evolve). Most solution providers have developed their own modifications to the various techniques. All of these principles are based on a holistic approach to DevOps, and organizations of all sizes can use them.
Develop and test in a production-like environment
The bottom line is to allow development teams and quality assurance (QA) teams to design and test systems that behave like production systems so they can see how the application behaves and works long before it is ready for deployment. ...
An application must be connected to production systems as early as possible during its lifecycle to address three major potential issues. First, it allows you to test your application in an environment similar to the real environment. Second, it allows you to test and validate your application delivery processes in advance. Third, it allows the operations team to test early in the lifecycle how their environment will behave when applications are deployed, thereby enabling them to create a highly customizable application-centric environment.
Deployment with reproducible, reliable processes
This principle allows development and operator teams to maintain agile software development processes throughout the entire lifecycle. Automation is critical to creating iterative, reliable and reproducible processes. Therefore, the organization must create a delivery pipeline that enables continuous automated deployment and testing. Frequent deployment also allows teams to test deployment processes, thereby reducing the risk of deployment failures during real releases.
Monitoring and quality control of work
Organizations are good at monitoring applications in production because they have tools that capture metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) in real time. This principle brings monitoring early in the lifecycle, ensuring that automated testing tracks functional and non-functional attributes of an application early in the process. Whenever an application is tested and deployed, quality metrics must be examined and analyzed. Monitoring tools provide early warning of operational and quality issues that may arise during production. These indicators should be collected in a format that is accessible and understandable to all stakeholders.
Feedback loop enhancement
One of the goals of DevOps processes is to enable organizations to respond faster and make changes faster. When delivering software, this goal requires the organization to receive feedback at an early stage, and then quickly learn from every action taken. This principle requires organizations to create communication channels that allow interested parties to access and interact on a feedback basis. Development can be carried out by adjusting their project plans or priorities. Manufacturing can act by improving the working environment.
Dev
- Scheduling: Kanboard, Wekan, and other Trello alternatives GitLab, Tuleap, Redmine and other JIRA alternatives; Mattermost, Roit.im, IRC and other Slack alternatives.
- : Git, Gerrit, Bugzilla; Jenkins CI/CD
- : Apache Maven, Gradle, Apache Ant, Packer
- : JUnit, Cucumber, Selenium, Apache JMeter
Ops
- , , : Kubernetes, Nomad, Jenkins, Zuul, Spinnaker, Ansible, Apache ZooKeeper, etcd, Netflix Archaius, Terraform
- : Grafana, Prometheus, Nagios, InfluxDB, Fluentd, ,
(* , . .)
DevOps is an increasingly popular methodology that aims to bring developers and operators together into a coherent whole. It is unique, different from traditional IT operations, and complementary to Agile (but not as flexible).
Find out the details of how to get a high-profile profession from scratch or Level Up in skills and salary by taking SkillFactory's paid online courses:
- DevOps course (12 months)
more courses
- Machine Learning (12 )
- Data Science (12 )
- (9 )
- «Python -» (9 )