Everything you Need to Know About DevOps

DevOps involves collaboration between the development and operations team to enable faster production in an automated and repeatable way. Implementing DevOps practices enables organizations to speed up the delivery of applications and services. 

Why Businesses Need DevOps

• Enable development and operations teams to work in tandem. 
• Accelerate testing, deployment, and designing process.  
• Reduce human errors due to manual code deployment leads.
• Achieve faster time to market. 
• Reduce the failure rate of new releases.  

According to Forrester Consulting Study, Only 17% of teams can use delivery software fast enough. 

Understanding the Difference between Traditional IT and DevOps

DevOps is the key to ongoing business transformation and expansion. Read this blog to explore the benefits of DevOps to your business-  Benefits of Implementing DevOps in your Business. 

Where to use DevOps 

DevOps practices should be implemented with distributed applications such as eCommerce websites or applications hosted on a cloud platform. 

What is the DevOps Life cycle?

There are various phases involved in DevOps Life Cycle including continuous deployment(CD), continuous integration (CI), continuous testing,  continuous deployment, and continuous monitoring. 

Let’s dig in more into these phases of the DevOps life cycle: 

Continuous Development (CD) - Involves “planning” and “coding” of the software. In the planning phase, vision is decided and developers then start with the development of code for the application. DevOps service provider companies do not use DevOps tools for planning but they use it to maintain the code. Codes can be written in any language but maintained with version control tools. Maintaining the code is known as Source Code management. DevOps tools used in maintaining the code include Git, Mercurial, JIRA, SVN whereas Ant, Gradel, and Maven are used in the building or packaging of the code. 

Read in detail about the DevOps Tools here: Choosing An Ideal DevOps Tool to Accelerate Development

Continuous Testing: Stage where an app or software is tested for bugs. Various tools are famous for continuous testing in the DevOps such as Selenium, TestNG, JUnit, etc The tools enable Quality Assurance ( QAs) to optimally test multiple code-bases to ensure the developed software functions flawlessly.  The use of Docker Containers in this phase of the DevOps cycle simulates the test environment. 

Continuous Integration: It is the heart of the entire DevOps life cycle. In this, the DevOps team commit changes to the source code more frequently. Usually, the changes are made on a daily or weekly basis. Continuous integrations enable early detection of problems. Building code includes compilation, code review, unit testing, integration testing, and packaging. Codes supporting functionalities are integrated with the existing code. Since the process involves continuous software development, the updated codes are integrated continuously with the system to reflect changes to the end-user. 

Jenkin is one of the most used DevOps tools in the integration of DevOps. To gather more details about it click here. 

Continuous Deployment: Stage where code is deployed to the production servers. Apart from testing and integrating it is critical for developers to correctly deploy codes on all the servers. The stage talks about configuration management and containerization tools useful in achieving Continuous Deployment(CD). 

1. Configuration Management facilitates establishing and maintaining consistency in an application’s performance and functional requirements. In this developers release deployments to servers, schedule updates on all servers, and keep configurations consistent across all the servers. Since the code is deployed continuously, Configuration management tools enable execution of tasks quickly and frequently. Tools used: Chef, Ansible, Puppet, SaltStack. 

2. Containerization Tools: Maintains consistency across environments where the application is built, tested, and deployed. These tools reduce the scope of errors and failures by replicating the same dependencies used in the testing, development, and staging environment. It makes an application run smoothly on different computers or operating systems. Facilitates scaling-up and scaling-down of instances swiftly. It enables software developers to achieve consistency across development, testing, staging, and production environments. Popular Tools used: Docker and Vagrant. 

Continuous Monitoring: Applications are constantly monitored for performance in this phase of the DevOps life cycle. Every vital information about the use of the software is recorded and processed in this phase to recognize the functionality of the application. The continuous monitoring stage of DevOps is crucial because it evaluates the system errors and resolves them before an app is released. Development and operation teams identify the root cause of an issue in this phase to prevent bugs before an app is released. 

The popular tools used: Splunk, ELK Stack, Nagios, NewRelic and Sensu. 

Would you like to shorten your software development life cycle? Our DevOps software development methodologies deliver applications and services with efficiency. Our DevOps model automates and accelerates the processes between software developers and operations teams. The aim of our DevOps consulting services is to improve management processes, decrease cost and deliver end-to-end agility.