The adoption of DevOps culture in business enterprises has generated a lot of discussion in the IT business environment. Many IT professionals will attest that full DevOps adoption is easier said than done, but with the need to create a collaborative atmosphere in software development and the call to aspire to improve quality software with few holes. There is no better time for business IT enterprises to adopt DevOps principles than now.
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This DevOps Beginner’s Guide will immerse you in the DevOps culture, exploring key DevOps methods, models, and tools that will make it easier for you to achieve DevOps transformation.
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What is DevOps?
DevOps is a software development model that brings development and operations into the same table to facilitate efficient and secure software production and distribution. DevOps facilitates collaboration between development and operations teams for brainstorming and deliberation on how to develop and deliver software products with maximum efficiency.
The DevOps model ensures that the best teams, technologies, and processes needed to accelerate, automate, and create best software work together throughout the software development lifecycle. When there is a clear implementation of DevOps ethos, separate IT teams such as development, quality assurance, IT operations, and security will come together under the same umbrella to develop and deliver more reliable software meet customer requirements and comply. With a DevOps culture, everyone in the software development circle is expected to contribute to increasing the chances of releasing products that achieve business goals.
The main goal of DevOps is to eliminate bottlenecks and vulnerabilities caused by moving software development processes from one team to another. Organizational vulnerabilities cause disruption in the software development process, leaving different teams to blame when things go awry. All of these affect delivery quality, but DevOps encourages a collaborative culture where everyone on the software development team is expected to be a part of the project from the ideation stage. until software release.
DevOps Guiding Principles
To develop software that makes the most of DevOps, there are principles that guide DevOps practice. These include:
Team collaboration and communication
Collaboration and communication between different IT teams underlines the goal of DevOps. Development, security, operations teams, and software engineers or testers must work as one unit to build the perfect DevOps culture in any business.
Software development automation
What makes DevOps such a rapid software delivery and production strategy is to include automation. IT automation helps to reduce repetitive processes and human intervention in the software development process.
Continuous integration and delivery
CI / CD is the heartbeat of DevOps. Continuous integration ensures that DevOps teams continuously merge code changes into the codestore to improve software performance, while continuous delivery facilitates automation of the release process software until production.
Meet user experience, compliance, and business needs
DevOps also balances the business, compliance and user experience goals. That’s why DevOps teams include quality assurance engineers and software testers, who help ensure that only software products that meet these goals are released.
DevOps model life cycle
For DevOps methods to work for your business, it’s important to understand the DevOps model lifecycle. The DevOps model lifecycle consists of different phases or phases of software development continuum that guide the entire DevOps team to maintain an efficient loop in the software development cycle. There are seven key components of the DevOps model lifecycle.
The non-stop development
This is the first phase of the life cycle where all the teams come together to map out a road map of how they can achieve the project goals. At this point, everything is focused on planning and designing what should be included or excluded.
Continuous integration
At this stage, everyone on the team should be aware of what needs to be contributed to make the project successful. Here, developers are expected to start contributing their code to the repository. Depending on the timeframes allotted to projects, code commits to the repository can arrive weekly or daily. Since each block of code is merged into the repository, at this stage the code will have to go through some form of code review and unit and integration testing.
Continuity check
At this stage, the team checks the software for bugs and other forms of code failure. Here, automated testing tools like JUnit and Selenium can be implemented to make continuous testing faster.
Continuous monitoring
Continuous monitoring helps DevOps teams ensure that critical software bugs that could hinder the overall performance of the software have been addressed. During the monitoring phase, the software is scrutinized and information about performance failures can be collected. At this stage, issues like latency, memory usage, and server response issues are monitored, logged, and reported for improvement.
Continuous feedback
DevOps makes room for continuous software improvement. The continuous feedback phase serves as a progress report, where feedback from the software is collected and analyzed to improve performance.
Continuous deployment
Developers are expected to start deploying their code to production servers at this stage. Configuration management tools like Puppet, Chef or Ansible can be used to manage deployments.
Continuous operation
This is the final stage of the DevOps model lifecycle. This phase involves automating software releases and rolling out necessary updates to the software. Although this is the final stage in the cycle, it does not indicate the end of the software development process. Instead, it just keeps the cycle going.
How to apply the DevOps model
It’s one thing to show the components of the DevOps model and another to apply it in real-world conditions. Here’s how organizations can successfully adopt the DevOps model for their business.
Start by adopting a DevOps mindset
It’s not simply enough to tell your teams that you’re going to use DevOps without taking the time to let every team member understand what DevOps means. Implementing a DevOps mindset involves explaining to everyone why it’s important to develop and operate in the same department.
When everyone agrees to adopt DevOps, then you have a mindset that can implement effective DevOps methods.
Set metrics to measure performance standards
It is important to identify all the metrics needed to measure progress in DevOps adoption. Mapping these metrics from the start will ensure that everyone understands the parameters that are improving and how to measure them.
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Some metrics to measure progress in DevOps include:
- Failure rate in production: This measures how often the software fails during production.
- Average time to recovery: This measures how long it takes a piece of software in production to recover from a failure.
- Deployment speed: This measures how quickly the team can deploy a new version of the application to a specific production environment.
- Deployment frequency: This metric helps determine how often you should deploy new releases to production environments.
- Average time to production: This measures how long it takes for a new commit of code to be deployed to production.
- Average lead time: Average lead time is the time it takes for a new requirement to be integrated, tested, and deployed to production.
Understand your business needs
Every business is different in terms of goals and the way in which they are achieved. Your DevOps team should understand these goals and why they should be vigorously pursued using the DevOps framework.
Apply changes iteratively
When moving to the DevOps software development model, ideally, you take projects one step at a time. Don’t make the mistake of mixing things up because you’ve assembled a team that can take on multiple projects.
Emphasize the importance of quality assurance
One of the main goals of DevOps is quality assurance. A lot of emphasis should be placed on providing early software products that meet the needs of users.
DevOps cannot succeed without using the best DevOps tools to facilitate and automate several processes. The best DevOps tools that you should consider when adopting the DevOps model for software development include GitLab, Ansible, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Puppet, Selenium, Chef, and Docker. For more information, read Best DevOps Tools & Solutions 2022: DevOps Software Comparison.
