Introduction to DevOps for Beginners

In this article, we are going to have a basic introduction to DevOps. what are the various goals, benefits, and practices of implementing DevOps in any organization?

What is DevOps

DevOps can be defined as a culture or process or practice within an organization that increases the communication, collaboration and integration of the Development (which includes the QA team) and the Operations (IT Operations) teams. The aim is to automate and speed up the software delivery process much more frequently and reliably.

Even though ‘Continuous Delivery’ is another term that is often used in conjunction with DevOps, there are some differences.

Some of the phases may not fit in all kinds of services or products. Ex. ‘Operation’ phase is not relevant in the case of a product that is shipped to an external customer. The operation of that product falls under the customer’s operation life cycle.

DevOps Goals

The goals of DevOps are to make improvements across all components in the product and service delivery. They include :

• Improved deployment frequency

• Faster time to market

• Lower failure rates of new releases

• Faster recovery time from crashes or failures.

DevOps Benefits

Some of the advantages of DevOps are :

• Significantly shorter time-to-market

• Improved customer satisfaction

• Better product quality

• More reliable releases

• Improved productivity and efficiency

• The increased ability to build the right product by fast experimentation.

DevOps Practices

DevOps is more than just a set of practices. There are many that are used in the industry. The following section will list the top and commonly used practice in a DevOps process in an IT organization.

i. Start small.

Trying to do too much at once is a recipe for disaster. It is better to start small projects and gain the confidence of the team. Start a project that has a high success probability. This could be a pilot or prototype or proof of concept project.

ii. Concentrate on the process and not on the tools.

It is better to be a tool independent and a good process should have the ability to replace one tool with another without too much disruption.

iii. Put everything under version control.

To reliably deploy an application on to production, all the items that are required for building the application: code, test cases, design documents, external libraries, databases and anything that could be updated, has to be put under version control.

iv. Maintain a production-equivalent staging environment

Typically the development of the environment is different from production. So, to avoid issues that are found only after going into production, like performance, access related and such, it is advised to have a staging environment where all those issues can be found before production.

v. Frequent deployment to production

To make any new feature, bug fixes, security patches to the customer ASAP, it is suggested to deploy code frequently. It could be once for each sprint cycle in an Agile development setup, or once every duration as fixed by the DevOps team (part of Release Management).

vi. Automate build of app environment

For a simple application, this is not much of a concern. But for most complex applications, setting up the run environment, like setting load balancer, databases, web server, network interconnectivity and all things operation oriented, it is better to have an automated way to DevOps Strategy Document build environment to reduce time to set up and also reduce any human errors. Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) is used for this purpose.

vii. Automate deployment of application

In addition to the above environment build automation, it is also very beneficial to have automation to deploy the application to the environment. This includes initializing the databases, initial setup of the application, installation of dependencies and others. The automated build and deployment can be achieved through ‘Infrastructure as a code’ methodology.

DevOps Tools

Since DevOps is more of a process, there is not a single tool that helps in deploying DevOps practice in an organization. It is more of a ‘toolchain’, a suite of tools that helps in the implementation of a chosen DevOps practice. DevOps implementation doesn’t mean to throw away existing tools in favor of new ones. It involves in integrating the existing tools and migrating the non-compliant tools to fit the chosen practice/process. The process steps you need to consider for tools support are:

• Request capture and ticket workflow

• Source Control

• Agile Planning

• Test Case Management

• Build automation

• Continuous deployment

• Release Management

• Automated test scripts and Load Testing

• Feedback Management

• Team Collaboration

• Application Telemetry

• Lab Management