At its core, DevOps is a philosophy and practice focused on agility, collaboration, and automation within IT and development team processes.
Traditionally, software development occurred in silos, with IT and development working independently within their own teams and processes. This separation and competing values created an environment rife with miscommunication, poor alignment, and production delays (some have even nicknamed the operations department the “War Room”.
DevOps is the response to the “us vs. them” culture of development.
The goal is to bridge the gap between IT operations and development to improve communication and collaboration, create more seamless processes, and align strategy and objectives for faster and more efficient delivery.
DevOps principles
Though DevOps is a practical methodology, it is also fundamentally a mindset and cultural shift in an organization. Several key principles underscore this philosophy:
- Automation: Automate everything, such as workflows, testing new code, and how your infrastructure is provisioned to cut down on waste and overwork.
- Iteration: Write small chunks of code during a time-box sprint to support releases and sub-releases that increase the speed and frequency of deployments.
- Continuous improvement: Continuously test, learn from failures, and act on feedback in order to optimize performance, cost, and time to deployment.
- Collaboration: Unite teams, foster communication, and break down silos between development, IT operations, and quality assurance.
Benefits of DevOps
Its focus on collaboration, automation, and agility can have significant benefits, including:
- Faster time to market
- Higher ROI
- Greater user/customer satisfaction
- Increased efficiency
- Improved collaboration
- Early detection and correction of issues
The DevOps process flow
The DevOps process flow is all about agility and automation. Each phase in the DevOps lifecycle focuses on closing the loop between development and operations and driving production through continuous development, integration, testing, monitoring and feedback, delivery, and deployment.
Continuous development
Continuous development is an umbrella term that describes the iterative process for developing software to be delivered to customers. It involves continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment.
By implementing a continuous development strategy and its associated sub-strategies, businesses can achieve faster delivery of new features or products that are of higher quality and lower risk, without running into significant bandwidth barriers.
Continuous integration
Continuous integration (CI) is a software development practice commonly applied in the DevOps process flow. Developers regularly merge their code changes into a shared repository where those updates are automatically tested.
Continuous integration ensures the most up-to-date and validated code is always readily available to developers. CI helps prevent costly delays in development by allowing multiple developers to work on the same source code with confidence, rather than waiting to integrate separate sections of code all at once on release day.
This practice is a crucial component of the DevOps process flow, which aims to combine speed and agility with reliability and security.
Continuous testing
Continuous testing is a verification process that allows developers to ensure the code actually works the way it was intended to in a live environment. Testing can surface bugs and particular aspects of the product that may need fixing or improvement and can be pushed back to the development stages for continued improvement.
Continuous monitoring and feedback
Throughout the development pipeline, your team should have measures in place for continuous monitoring and feedback of the products and systems. Again, the majority of the monitoring process should be automated to provide continuous feedback.
This process allows IT operations to identify issues and notify developers in real-time. Continuous feedback ensures higher security and system reliability as well as more agile responses when issues do arise.
Continuous delivery
Continuous delivery (CD) is the next logical step from CI. Code changes are automatically built, tested, and packaged for release into production. The goal is to release updates to the users rapidly and sustainably.
To do this, CD automates the release process (building on the automated testing in CI) so that new builds can be released at the click of a button.
Continuous deployment
For the seasoned DevOps organization, continuous deployment may be the better option over CD. Continuous deployment is the fully automated version of the CD with no human (i.e., manual) intervention necessary.
In a continuous deployment process, every validated change is automatically released to users. This process eliminates the need for scheduled release days and accelerates the feedback loop. Smaller, more frequent releases allow developers to get user feedback quickly and address issues with more agility and accuracy.
Continuous deployment is a great goal for a DevOps team, but it is best applied after the DevOps process has been ironed out. For continuous deployment to work well, organizations need to have a rigorous and reliable automated testing environment. If you’re not there yet, starting with CI and CD will help you get there.
Implementing DevOps in your organization
If you haven’t yet implemented a DevOps process in your organization, the task can seem daunting. Keep in mind—it is not only a process shift but a cultural shift as well.
As you strive for successful DevOps adoption, consider implementing it in stages. Depending on where your organization currently stands, you may want to build on an agile approach for DevOps implementation.
A gradual implementation sequence might look like this:
- Establish an agile development process
- Adopt cloud computing
- Adapt your processes to a CI and CD workflow
- Automate your software deployment
- Automate software testing
- Implement continuous deployment
Keep in mind that DevOps automation brings with it both an infrastructural and tooling shift. Without the proper infrastructure and tools to support your processes, you risk having gaps in your DevOps process flow. To create a true DevOps environment, each stage of the development pipeline should be as automated and agile as possible.
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Also consider how visuals can help you map out your DevOps processes and understand everything from who is working on what, to timelines, and process flows. Visuals can ease the implementation process, keeping everyone on the same page from the start.
