Understanding the Mainstream Concept of DevOps

From working in silos to perfect collaboration, development and operations have come a long way. With the operations team disconnected from the development efforts, a few years back there were a lot of inefficiencies to address in the software development world.

Today, with DevOps, both development and operations teams have managed to integrate their services and collaborate from the grass root levels -the result, a faster more accurate output of better quality embracing business, technology and user goals, thereby forcing companies to evolve and incorporate the concepts of DevOps — Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.

Today, with DevOps, both development and operations teams have managed to integrate their services and collaborate from the grass root levels -the result, a faster more accurate output of better quality embracing business, technology and user goals, thereby forcing companies to evolve and incorporate the concepts of DevOps — Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.

A quick look at the reasons for the alignment of development and operations helps clear the concept. The need for DevOps arose primarily due to inefficiencies in the delivery process — these were largely around the following areas:

• Traditionally both development and operations teams worked in isolation with each unaware of what the other was doing
• Consequently, designing, testing and deployment were taking more time than the actual build cycles
• Manual deployment led to production errors which further delayed the whole operations
• There was no coordination between different verticals associated with the project at hand, thereby resulting in chaos in almost every function

The above, combined with a rising market demand for an increase in the rate of delivery, not compromising on quality and feature sets, necessitated a scalable and effective solution right away.

DevOps Deliverables

With the development of DevOps, the system of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI-CD) was a much needed, welcome change to enable:

• Predictability which resulted in a significant lowering of the failure rate of the new software released
• Reproducibility which versioned everything, thereby enabling easy restoration of earlier versions as required
• Maintainability which enabled effortless recovery in instances of a system crash or disability
• Reduction in delivery time by a sizeable number, sometimes as high as 50%
• Quality improvement (not just in defect detection but also defect prevention and enhanced app security) which resulted from the proper incorporation of infrastructure and team collaboration Resilience making the operational state stable and secure with auditable changes
• Cost efficiency, wherein the finished product justified the amount invested
• Overall better user acceptance due to the above mentioned operational and delivery excellence measures

DevOps is based on the method of Agile programming wherein larger codes are broken into smaller chunks, thereby making the whole concept more manageable and efficient.

Choosing the Right DevOps Tools

The basic concept of DevOps focuses on collaborative automation facilitated by the use of specific tools. However, taking into account the fact that DevOps lifecycle consists of 6 critical phases, there is no single tool which can magically assist end to end Hence, it is always better to list down the tools required for the individual phases and implement them accordingly.

• Planning: This needs tools which provide features related to sprint planning, asynchronous brainstorming and integrations. It is also a great practice to enable continuous user feedback gathering and then organizing the same into actionable inputs so that the development teams can prioritize them. Tools which work by collaborating vision with design so that the finished product can be optimized from the feedback obtained from users are those which are absolutely essential to enable proper planning.
• Building: Developers have been known to prefer open-source tools to enable the use of environments which support individual development. Such tools facilitate better work output by enabling coding against disposable and virtual production replicas. This helps to spin myriad of variations of the required development environment, thereby enabling the creation of reliable and easily maintainable modular applications. Thus infrastructure becomes core, and collaborative coding helps improve overall quality with the help of pull requests.
• Continuous integration: This refers to a practice wherein code is checked to a shared repository many times a day and it is also tested every time. This helps in:

★ Early detection of problems

★ Faster fixing of issues and

★ Enabling quicker delivery of new features to users

The key is to maintain the testing rigor and at the same time, prevent sacrificing speed of development. Thus it is better to look for tools which enable automatic testing that not only help speed up the development as well as the testing cycles but also increase awareness of the same.

• Deployment: Accumulating information regarding the changes incorporated, the tests conducted and the actual deployment in one place before the release of new software, is probably the most stressful part of the whole program. But this can be made easier by the use of release dashboards which help integrate deployment tools and code repository within a single dashboard. This effectively means that everything from branches and builds, deployment warnings and pull requests are all present in one place.
• Operations: It is a fact that both application performance and servers, need monitoring. Hence, to understand the overall health and trends of the concerned environment, the required tools need to enable listening to and recording of data 24 by 7. It is always better to integrate these tools with group chats so that alerts can be effectively passed on to enable cross-team communication in real-time so that issues can be fixed faster. A very important contributor to the success of DevOps is for all its inherent teams to be on the same page. Thus when incidents and development projects get tracked on different systems, the DevOps application fails to perform. Hence tools employed to facilitate proper functioning of the operations teams should be able to ensure that all incidents and problems that take place, changes made to counter it and the development of software projects, are all done on a single platform. This helps in facilitating faster problem tracking and resolution.
• Feedback continuity: This can only be enabled when there is perfect integration between the chat tools and survey platforms. This ensures ease of access to user feedback, especially those coming from social media platforms so that they can be used as guiding factors in release planning, exploratory testing sessions etc.

The right selection of DevOps tools is possible only after a thorough analysis of the pros and cons of the current processes involving software development, and its concurrent IT operations. A DevOps program when implemented effectively has countless benefits to offer — the right tool set choice is an integral part of this program — the above article is a start in the journey to successful DevOps implementation — stay tuned for more to come.