DevOps is an outgrowth of agile software development that arose from the need to keep up with the increased software velocity and throughput achieved by agile methodologies. Over the past decade, advances in agile culture and methodology have shown the need for a more comprehensive approach to the end-to-end software delivery lifecycle.
What are the issues that DevOps addresses?
Before DevOps application development, teams were responsible for collecting business requirements and producing code for a software product. A second QA team then tests the program in an isolated development environment, and if all requirements are met, the code is released for operations to deploy. The deployment teams are further subdivided into silos such as networking and database. The issue with this paradigm is that when the teams operate independently:
- Dev is often oblivious of QA and operations (ops) bottlenecks that prevent the software from functioning as expected.
- QA and operations usually operate across several features and have a limited understanding of the software’s commercial purpose and value.
- When anything goes wrong, each group has conflicting objectives, which may lead to inefficiency and blame pointing.
DevOps consulting services solve these concerns by forming collaborative cross-functional teams that share responsibility for maintaining the system that runs the software as well as preparing the program to operate on that system with improved quality feedback and automation issues.
What exactly is the objective of DevOps?
Improve coordination among all stakeholders from planning through delivery, as well as delivery process automation, to:
- Increase the frequency of deployment.
- Reduce the failure rate of new releases by achieving a quicker time to market.
- Reduce the time between fixes.
- Increase the mean time to recovery.
Read: Digital Transformation In Healthcare: DevOps Trends
What are the tools used in DevOps?
We briefly addressed some of the tools used in DevOps earlier; here are some of the main tools and techniques you should be aware of.
Repository of source code
A source code repository is a location where developers may check in and make changes to their code. The source code repository controls the several versions of code that are checked in, ensuring that developers do not overwrite one other’s work.
Source control has most likely been around for forty years, yet it is an important part of continuous integration.
Create a server
A build server is an automated tool that converts the source code repository’s code into executable code. Jenkins, SonarQube, and Artifactory are popular tools.
Configuration administration
Configuration management is the process of defining the configuration of a server or an environment. Puppet and Chef are two popular configuration management technologies.
Infrastructure virtualization
Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are two examples of virtual infrastructures. Cloud suppliers who offer infrastructure or platform as a service provide virtual infrastructures (PaaS). With the aid of configuration management tools like Puppet and Chef, you may create new machines programmatically thanks to the APIs included in these infrastructures.
Virtual infrastructures combine with automation technologies to provide DevOps businesses the opportunity to set up a server without touching the keyboard. If you want to test your brand-new code, you can send it to your cloud infrastructure, set up the environment, and then run all of the tests without requiring human interaction.
To learn more: devsecops consulting
Automation of tests
Automation of tests has been around for a long time. DevOps testing focuses on automated testing inside your build pipeline to guarantee that when you have a deployable build, you are certain that it is ready to deploy. Without a robust automated testing approach, you can’t get to the stage of continuous delivery where you’re quite certain that your code is deployable without any human involvement. Selenium and water are popular tools.
Pipeline coordination
A pipeline is similar to a manufacturing assembly line in that it occurs from the moment a developer says, “I guess I’m done,” until the code is placed in production or a late-stage pre-production environment.
Read: What Will You Learn In DevOps Engineer Certification?
Bringing corporate software development and delivery together
Digital.ai Agility, previously VersionOne, combines agile application lifecycle management and DevOps into a single platform, delivering a complete image of the whole software delivery pipeline. Continuum by Digital.ai is an enterprise continuous delivery system that automates, orchestrates, and visualizes the flow of change across the software delivery cycle.