Article by Sanjeev
Have you heard the term DevOps before? If not, then you might be thinking that DevOps is a software or programming language or a framework. In this article, I’m going to tell you about DevOps in simple language.
DevOps is a model or a set of best practice that helps organizations deliver their product faster and with minimum bugs or errors. It helps software development and operations teams to collaborate to improve productivity, reliability and faster development.
Here is what I’m going to cover in this article:
- What is DevOps ?
- Advantages of DevOps
- DevOps Lifecycle
So, let’s begin.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a combination of two words – Development & Operations. DevOps is a combination of cultures, tools, processes to manage the software development lifecycle i.e. planning, development, testing, deployment, maintenance, and monitoring.
DevOps is used to improve the collaboration between the two teams – development & operations. The ultimate goal of using DevOps is to increase productivity, reduce the development time, automating the repeatable processes and team collaboration.
In software development, continuous integration and new feature implementation is always going on. There are several cases where the development team completes the implementation task for new features and tested but the new features don’t go live from the operations team. To resolve issues like this, a new software development model called “DevOps” was introduced.
In DevOps, both teams know what’s going on the other side. With the help of this approach, it helps businesses to make their product or services available as soon as possible.
It also becomes necessary for a DevOps engineer to understand all the tools and practices in the lifecycle of development.
In DevOps, team members exchange all the information regarding the project with each other in a timely manner. If required, they can exchange roles.
It reduces the risk of product failure, as there is regular feedback from the clients. Timely feedback helps developers to make the changes in the product as early as possible, which saves a lot of time and effort for both teams.
There are various automation tools used by the team which help them to roll out the recent change once it’s done.
Why DevOps comes into Picture?
If you want a website or a small software, then you might engage services from small development companies who take requirements and start developing the software after some initial planning.
But for building complex software, you need a software model that ensures faster bug fixing and speed of development.
Previously, there are various models that have been used in software development like Waterfall and Agile. There are many big companies who are working on these models, but every model has its own advantage and disadvantage.
In those models, one of the most problematic area is team collaboration, where both development and operation teams work in isolation. Because of that, there is no information exchanges between the teams, which ultimately increases/delays the development time.
Advantages of Using DevOps
- DevOps helps the organization in faster bug fixing for issues.
- Automation increases productivity and teams can reduce the workforce by implementing the automation for repetitive tasks like deployment.
- DevOps helps in increasing flexibility between the teams. Operation and development teams know what is currently ongoing. Because there are tools Git, SVN, docker, puppet which help automate the process.
- Because of DevOps, both teams need to know about the tools that are used on both sides which helps them to improve their skills.
- DevOps removes the isolation between the teams. This helps the teams to work jointly with great synergy.
DevOps Lifecycle
Before using DevOps, it is important to understand the lifecycle of DevOps. Here are 5 main phases involved in DevOps and various tools used by DevOps engineers to execute each phase:
- Development Phase: The development part is divided into separate modules. There may be various teams working on different modules. This approach helps to speed up the development process. Here, tools like Git, SVN, Jira are used to track the changes made by the developer’s team.
- Testing Phase: The testing phase ensures the quality of the product. If there is any possible error, then it can be resolved earliest. Here, testing team can do a lot of automation to save time and reduce failure rate by defining various test cases. Various tools can be used like Selenium & Junit.
- Integration Phase: This is a critical phase which integrates the latest code with the previous one. So, it needs a lot of attention. After the integration of the newer version, it needs to be tested properly for various test cases to avoid issues and failures. Tools that are used at this stage include Bamboo, Hudson, Jenkins, etc.
- Deployment Phase: The regular updates and deployment of new features need to be handled with a lot of care. The reason being if you have a running website or software with millions of visitors, you would not want to cause user dissatisfaction due to inappropriate/unplanned downtime. The tools that majorly used here are Docker, Chef, Puppet and many others.
- Monitoring Phase: Monitoring is the last but the most important phase. After the deployment of new features and updates, it is necessary to keep eyes on the newer version. Here, some tools that help in this process include Splunk, Slack, Nagios, etc.
Conclusion
I hope you have found above information regarding “DevOps” useful. I have tried to simplify as much as possible. To become a DevOps engineer, you need to understand how these tools work. If you have found this article interesting, please share it with others.
