How DevOps Takes Care of the Challenges Faced by Development and Operation Teams
DevOps combines developers and operations teams’ efforts to improve productivity and collaboration.
It helps companies to better serve their clients or users and compete more effectively in the market. What other benefits does DevOps provide?
Let’s dive into this popular concept to understand its importance and avoid confusion and contradictory impressions of what it is.
What is DevOps? The definition
DevOps (development and operations) is a combination of software engineering culture, philosophy, tools, and practice that is aimed to increase an ability of a company to deliver services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace using traditional development and management processes.
DevOps approach is about strongly advocated automation and monitoring at all stages of software construction.
It aims at shorter development cycles, increased deployment frequency, and more dependable releases, in close alignment with business goals.
DevOps is also characterized by using many of the same techniques and methods as developers use for their systems work.
DevOps, Agile and Continuous delivery
DevOps and Agile development are similar, but Agile is a change in thinking and practice (that should lead to organizational change). DevOps is paying more attention to implementing organizational changes to achieve its goals. The need for DevOps was increased because of the growing popularity of Agile.
Continuous delivery and DevOps are similar in their meanings. However, they represent two different concepts:
- DevOps is centered around organizational changes, developers, operations, quality assurance, management, system administration, coordinators.
- Continuous delivery means the approach to automating the delivery aspect, that focuses on combining different processes and doing them faster and more often.
DevOps and Continuous delivery use flexible methods: small and rapid changes with a targeted result for the end customer.
DevOps goals
The goals of DevOps involve the entire delivery pipeline, including:
- Improved deployment frequency
- Faster time to market
- The shortened time between fixes
- The lower failure rate of new releases
- Faster mean recovery time
DevOps is aimed to maximize the efficiency, predictability, and maintainability of operational processes.
The History of DevOps
The popularity of DevOps can be explained by increasing the need for innovation on the systems side of technology work.
The practice inherits from the Agile System Administration movement and the Enterprise Systems Management (ESM).
In 2008, the first Velocity conference was held. In 2009 there were some important presentations about the developer/operations collaboration at large shops. More and more people began to think about these newer concepts and wonder how they might apply them.
In 2009 Patrick Debois in Belgium presented the term by naming a conference “DevOpsdays”. The term DevOps started to be talked up more in other venues including Velocity and DevOpsDays in the USA.
Benefits of DevOps
High velocity
The DevOps philosophy enables developers and operations teams to move at high velocity and innovate for customers faster, adapting to changing markets better and growing more efficient at driving business results.
Rapid Delivery
Increasing the frequency of releases will improve your product faster. The faster you can release new features and fix bugs, the faster you can create competitive advantages, responding to your clients’ needs.
Scale
Manage your infrastructure and development processes at scale. Automation helps you manage complex or changing systems efficiently without risks.
Collaboration
DevOps culture stimulates to build more effective teams. Developers and operations teams collaborate closely and combine their workflows, sharing many responsibilities. It saves time and reduces inefficiencies.
Reliability
Care of the quality of updates and infrastructure changes. You will be able to reliably deliver at a more rapid pace, maintaining a positive experience for end users.
Security
Companies can adopt a DevOps approach without sacrificing security by using automated compliance policies and management techniques.
Who is a DevOps engineer?
DevOps describes an approach to work, however, there is a term that companies are increasingly using. It’s about a DevOps engineer.
The role of a DevOps engineer does not fall along one career track. Professionals can evolve into the position from different backgrounds.
DevOps position may be more suited to IT generalists than specialists.
A DevOps engineer may start as a developer that oversees aspects of operations or may move up from a system administrator role.
DevOps has evolved into a movement to facilitate software development and its implementation while improving reliability and security.
This culture delivers significant benefits across businesses. What do you think about evolving and applying DevOps practices?
