Modern DevOps Services - Plan Smarter, Collaborate Better And Ship Faster

DevOps is an evolving framework and a philosophy which pushes towards better and faster application development and quick release of new features or a product itself to the customers. The DevOps practices encourage development teams and the IT operations teams to have continuous communication, integration, collaboration, transparency and visibility.

So this kind of closer relationship between Development Team (Dev) and IT Operation Team (Ops) is what forms the DevOps cycle. A DevOps cycle consists of software planning, coding, test and release phase followed by deployment, operations and continuous monitoring. Through this cycle there arises a continuous loop to gather feedback from the customers for improvement – feature development, testing and deployment. This way the software will have continuous changes and quicker new releases of new features.

The Four Goals in the DevOps Solution are:

(CAMS) = Culture Automation Measurement and Sharing

It is possible to achieve it with the help of DevOps tools. With the help of such tools it is possible to streamline and collaborate the workflows of development and operations. This means you get to automate the manual tasks which are present in development, integration, testing and deployment. Here all you need is right DevOps Consulting Services to take up the task.

Why DevOps is important?

Apart from working on improving the collaboration and communication between the development and IT operations teams, something else that DevOps concentrates on is complete customer satisfaction in the form of faster delivery of service or feature. Through DevOps it is possible to boost continuous process improvement and push business innovation.

With DevOps it becomes possible for the businesses to deliver value to the end customer in better, faster and more secure way. The value here represents the release of features or product updates. It is all about how a new feature or a product release reaches the customer without compromising on security and quality. The other thing it focuses on is to find and identify a bug, resolve it and release it.

DevOps is also supported by the underlying infrastructure with availability and reliability of software as it is tested well before release and seamless performance.

Different DevOps Methods

To improve development and increase speed of product releases, there are a few DevOps methods which can be used by the organizations. They are the kind of software development methodologies available out there. Among them, few ones are quite popular and they are:

• Scrum: Scrum is a kind of software development methodology which shows how the teams should work with each other together in order to speed up the development and QA projects. This practice includes designated roles (Scrum Master, product owner), specific terminology (sprint, daily scrum, time boxes, meeting) and key workflows.

• Kanban: The progress of the software development can be tracked by making use of Kanban board. Based on the efficiencies gained from the Toyota factory floor Kanban has been developed.

• Agile: Earlier DevOps practices and tools were highly influenced by agile software development methods. Elements for agile programming were included in the DevOps methods like Kanban and Scrum. Some of the agile practices are more responsive towards changing requirements and needs, performing daily standups, documenting requirements in the form of user stories and including continuous customer feedback. Compared to the lengthy software development cycle like Waterfall, here it gets changed by shorter ones with agile.

DevOps Tool Chain

As a part of DevOps “toolchain” DevOps friendly-tools are used as a part of DevOps practices. The main objective behind using such tools is to shorten, streamline and automate the different stages of software development for delivery workflow. A good number of DevOps also promote rule of collaboration, automation and integration between the operations and development teams.

Some of the tools which are used in the different stages of DevOps life-cycle are:

• Plan: Business values and requirements are defined in this phase. You can track down the issues in the project using tools like Git or Jira and perform project management.

• Code: Creating software codes and software design is made possible in this phase. Some of the tools used for it are Git-Lab, GitHub, Stash or Bit bucket.

• Build: The software builds and versions can be managed in this phase. For the future release to production, you can make use of automated tools to compile and package code. You can make use of package repositories or code repositories for the infrastructure needs for the release of product. Some of the tools needed for it are Ansible, Docker, Maven, Chef, JFrog Artifactory or Gradle.

• Test: In order to achieve optimal code quality continuous testing is carried out in this phase. Some of the sample tools used is Co-deception, JUnit, Blaze Meter, Vagrant, Selenium or TestNG.

• Deploy: In this phase tools are used to carry out activities like automate product releases along with manage, coordinate and schedule them. Some of the tools used for the purpose are Jira, Chef, Kubernetes, Docker, Open stack, Jenkins, Open Shift, Ansible or Puppet.

• Operate: This phase is responsible to take care of the software during the process of production. Some of the sample tools used is Power-Shell, Otter, Puppet, Salt, Ansible or Chef.

• Monitor: This phase is all about collecting information regarding the issues in the software release. Some of the sample tools used in is Grafana, Nagios, New Relic, Slack, Datadog or Wire shark.

DevOps Practices

The aim of continuous improvement and automation is reflected through DevOps practices. Most of such practices concentrate on particular development phase in the cycle. The practices are:

• Continuous Development: This is a part of the DevOps cycle which spans the planning and coding phases. There might be activities like version-control mechanisms.

• Continuous Testing: As the code is newly written or updated in the application, this phase takes some tasks into account like pre scheduled, automated, continued testing of codes. During the production, these tests can help to deliver the codes quickly.

• Continuous Integration: Along with other test and development tools, this practice brings configuration management tools together. This helps to track the quantity of the code which is ready for production. It also involves obtaining rapid feedback between the cycle of development and testing quickly to find and resolve issues in the codes.

• Continuous Delivery: This practice is responsible to deliver the changes in the code after the completion of testing to a staging or pre production environment automatically. To whether use such change codes in the production or not is then decided by staff member.

• Continuous Deployment: The release of new or changed code to production is automated by this practice just like continuous delivery. There are chances of code releases or feature changes many times within a day in the company which goes for continuous deployment. By using Kubernetes and Docker kind of container technologies it becomes possible to enable continuous deployment all the while maintaining code consistency across different platforms and environments for deployment.

• Continuous Monitoring: This practice involves monitoring of underlying infrastructure and the code in operation together. The feedback loop which is responsible to monitor and report bugs then comes back to the development.

• Infrastructure as Code: This practice is carried out during the different phases of DevOps in order to automatically provision the requirement of infrastructure for the release of software. From within the existing development tools, developers add the code for infrastructure. For example, based on the demand from Kubernetes, Docker or OpenShift, storage volume might be created by developers. This practice allows the tasks like track changes, monitor environment configurations and ease the rollback of configurations for the operations teams.

Benefits of DevOps Solution

Opting for DevOps offers a number of technical and business benefits and they all contribute towards making happy customers. Some of the benefits of DevOps solution are:

• Greater Innovation
• Better and Quicker Product Delivery
• Greater Automation
• Better Resource Utilization
• Availability and Scalability at Its Best
• Reduced Complexity and Quicker Issue Resolution
• Operating Environments Which are More Stable
• Better Visibility for System Outcomes

History of DevOps

Many DevOps methods are based on lean programming and agile software development for streamlining software development and deployment. But, it is a fact that DevOps was developed from many small movements which together brought the developers’ activities along with that of their operations teams.

During the early years of 2000s, there was an increased requirement to make websites like Google and Flickr available against the huge hits. This way there was an increased need for the role of software reliable engineers who were part of operations to work in tune with developers so as to ensure that the code was released in to production while the sites would keep running.

In 2009, during a conference, the engineers at Flickr Paul Hammond and John Allspaw presented a methodology which was DevOps like. In the same year, “DevOps Day” was organised for the first time in Belgium by Patrick Debois. Following that more DevOps days were held and celebrated around the world and new hashtag #DevOps was incorporated.

In order to further meet the goals of DevOps, in the coming years open source tools and frameworks were proposed and developed.

Challenges that DevOps Resolve

Before coming up with DevOps services, development teams were considered responsible to understand the business, gather the requirements and finally code based on that collected information. After that, testing of the software is done by QA teams in an isolated environment to see the software works as expected and then is moved to the operations for deployment. The deployment teams consist of sub teams of database and networking. Whenever the software passes through each hand it adds bottlenecks.

Here the issues arise as the teams are working separately. It causes issues like:

1. Ops and QA teams are working on many features and have very little idea about the value of the software in the context of business purpose.
2. Dev team has the least idea about the issues that will be faced by the QA and Ops teams and this stops the software from working as expected.
3. The goals of all the teams are different and as they are working individually, there are more chances of finger-pointing if anything goes wrong in the software. This can lead to inefficiencies.

When you have DevOps solution in place, you resolve all these issues by collaborating different teams participating in software development. This way all the responsibilities are shared in order to ensure the software works as expected. Meanwhile automation issues are tracked and quality feedback is collected.

Goal of DevOps

DevOps is mainly focused on improving collaboration between the stakeholders. So right from planning to delivery everything is automated during the delivery process. It is done for:

• Increase the number of deployment frequency 
• Decrease the failure rate of new releases 
• Achieve quicker time to market  
• Bring down the time taken between bug fixes 
• Make better the mean time to recovery

Based on the State of DevOps Report that came in 2015, it is said, “high-performing IT organizations deploy 30x more frequently with 200x shorter lead times; they have 60x fewer failures and recover 168x faster.”

Conclusion

DevOps is a big concept and it means different to different people. This points that whether you are trying to understand it or define it, it can turn out to be a difficult thing. So the main focus should be to understand the foundational concepts of DevOps and have an idea about its history so that you can incorporate it into your business with ease.

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