DevOps practices bring together development and IT operations teams into a functional team that works with one pipeline for the entire lifecycle. This requires removing organizational silos and handoffs that limit team collaboration.
The benefits of implementing these practices include technical, cultural, and business improvements. For example, teams can speed up product releases with continuous delivery and faster feedback.
1. Automation
Automating tasks is a core DevOps practice that reduces human error and speeds up development and deployment processes. Automation can be applied in all stages of the software development process including: development, integration, deployment and monitoring. However, when implementing automation in the DevOps pipeline it’s important to focus on the areas where there will be a significant improvement in speed or efficiency.
A key element of automation in DevOps is Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD). CI/CD involves developers regularly merging code into the main source code repository and automatically running tests to ensure the quality of the code. This is achieved using a CI/CD server like Jenkins or Travis CI.
Other examples of automation in DevOps include infrastructure-as-code (IaC), which is a process for managing and provisioning IT infrastructure with machine-readable script files rather than manual tools. DevOps automation also involves regular performance monitoring to identify any issues and provide feedback to the team. This is essential as it ensures that the team can continuously improve their pipeline. DevOps automation also helps to minimize bottlenecks in the pipeline.
2. Continuous Integration
Continuous integration is an essential practice in DevOps that improves software delivery and quality. This is accomplished by shifting testing earlier in the development process, allowing developers to catch errors faster and more efficiently.
CI is a software development technique that continually merges code changes into a master branch to create an updated version of the codebase. This prevents individual developers’ local copies of the source code from drifting too far from a shared mainline and avoids catastrophic merge conflicts.
DevOps teams use a combination of continuous integration and continuous deployment to deliver frequent, reliable updates to customers. This shifts the focus from a giant application release once every several months or years to iterative smaller feature releases that occur frequently—even as often as several times per day.
The success of DevOps depends on building a strong culture, along with clear processes and automation. It’s recommended to start with a realistic application and dedicate a team, then build up to more complex and business-critical applications as you gain experience with the methodology. This approach allows you to assess your organization’s readiness to implement DevOps, and prioritize what to automate first for quick wins that will have the most impact on productivity and efficiency.
3. Deployment
DevOps practices help development teams quickly get updates and bug fixes to the customer. This ensures that they can respond to real customer needs and business requirements promptly, which improves the quality of service offered by the organization.
In a DevOps workflow, developers and operations employees work together as one team. This allows them to collaborate and communicate better and reduces siloed processes that could lead to a lack of coordination or communication between departments.
This integration between development and operations teams leads to faster feedback, which in turn, leads to a faster product release cycle. It also helps teams develop products and services centered around user needs.
Using DevOps best practices such as feature flags and canary releases helps to speed up deployment and improve the quality of code. This increases the speed of software deployment and helps to prevent bugs from affecting production systems. It also allows for gradual changes to be rolled out so that users can test and approve the updates without disrupting development teams. This enables them to roll back any unwanted changes and increase the reliability of software.
4. Monitoring
DevOps teams must be able to see how their code is working in production. This is especially important in a world of continuous integration and deployment that has accelerated change to production environments, making it harder for teams to keep up without visibility tools.
With visibility through monitoring, DevOps teams can reduce the risk of deploying features that aren’t functional or safe for use in the production environment. This helps them avoid poor customer experiences and improve product quality.
Monitoring practices in DevOps include collecting telemetry from infrastructure and software components, setting meaningful alerts, and using analytics to identify trends in performance data. These can be used to prevent and address issues, like slowdowns in application response time or outright system failure.
DevOps teams can also monitor user feedback and use it to inform improvements to software systems. This approach speeds up iteration cycles and allows teams to better meet consumer needs. It also improves collaboration, since it removes the ‘blind spot’ that results from developer and operations teams operating in siloes. In addition, DevOps practices encourage short feedback loops with users and other stakeholders.
5. Security
DevOps encourages smoother, continuous communication, collaboration, integration, and visibility between application development teams (Dev) and their IT operations team counterparts (Ops). This closer relationship enables developers and Ops to work together to speed up software builds, tests, and deployments without sacrificing quality.
Achieving widespread DevOps success requires more than just new tools. It means overhauling the structure of your teams to promote cross-functionality. It means embracing a culture of collaboration and trust to enable fast, reliable releases. It also means incorporating security practices into your DevOps workflows.
Adopting a DevOps mindset and culture can be challenging for established teams that are used to working in siloes. It’s important to start small and build up to more complex, business-critical applications as you gain experience with DevOps. Also, be sure to consider your existing workloads and incorporate DevOps principles into them as well. For example, you should use cloud-native techniques to support faster software builds, testing, and deployments while maintaining the reliability of your infrastructure. Finally, make sure to deploy and secure your DevOps environment with controls that ensure privileged access is limited and secrets are managed.