There is no doubt that DevOps is a powerful concept with the ability to transform software engineering projects. However, many teams focus on speed at the cost of quality or security.
The goal of DevOps is to bring development and operations teams together to work collaboratively and ensure that the applications are reliable for end users. It also involves automation that reduces errors that occur from manual processes.
Continuous Delivery
A DevOps approach to software deployment allows for frequent updates to be released and deployed. Using tools that automate the deployment pipeline, developers and operations teams work together more closely to ensure that releases occur as they should. This reduces the amount of time required to complete a release, improves performance and stability, and ultimately helps organizations deliver better products and services.
In the develop phase, teams use highly productive tools that help them develop code quickly and safely. They also implement version control and a staging environment to allow for the gradual rollout of changes. This reduces the risk of breaking production and allows for more frequent fixes to be made. It also enables the reversal of unintended changes, which is more difficult to do with large changes.
During the plan phase, teams create backlogs, set goals for each product and track progress at both low and high levels of granularity. They use agile software development techniques, such as Scrum or Kanban boards and visual progress metrics to manage their processes. This provides transparency and visibility, eliminating constraints that can halt progress.
In the build phase, teams automate many of the development, testing, and configuration procedures they previously performed manually. They also leverage microservices architecture to break large applications into smaller independently functioning components that can be deployed and tested more easily. Finally, they use telemetry to monitor the health of these systems and identify performance issues early, so they can be resolved quickly.
Continuous Integration
There comes a point in software development where all the individual pieces must be combined to ensure that the final product works as intended. In a DevOps environment, this happens often, and is usually called continuous integration (CI). CI allows teams to create automated testing processes that run each new build. When the tests fail, it’s easy to identify the cause and fix it quickly, before the code is released into production. This reduces the risk of broken production code and saves time and money for both developers and operations.
DevOps teams use continuous integration to enable continuous delivery. This process automates the entire build, test and deployment pipeline. It also helps them release software more frequently, with higher quality and stability. According to the DORA 2019 State of DevOps report, elite IT teams deploy 208 times more frequently than low-performing teams.
One of the key goals of DevOps is increased collaboration and communication between development and IT teams. One way to improve this is by implementing continuous monitoring. This is achieved by collecting telemetry data and setting alerts for critical conditions that require action from an operator. It is important to make sure that all team members have access to the same information so that they can see the same trends and patterns.
The best way to do this is with a unified dashboard that displays data from various sources. This will ensure that the developers and IT teams are working from the same data and can avoid misunderstandings or making assumptions based on incomplete information.
Continuous Monitoring
The final practice in the DevOps value stream, Continuous Monitoring, enables teams to track and respond to changes in applications and their underlying infrastructure. This allows for rapid detection, logging and analysis of issues, and reduces downtime by rapidly identifying problems and taking action.
Continuous Monitoring requires a culture of collaboration and transparency between software development and IT operations. DevOps practices such as automated deployment, agile and lean processes, continuous feedback, unified tooling, and cross-team communication help break down silos between software developers and IT administrators. These DevOps principles allow IT organizations to deploy updates to production more quickly, reducing time from product inception to market launch and increasing overall business agility.
High-performing DevOps teams rely on full visibility into applications and their underlying infrastructure, which can be achieved through the collection of rich telemetry and actionable alerts. This enables teams to observe the status of applications in real-time and study how performance impacts their end-users’ experiences, helping them continuously improve and evolve their systems.
As a result of improved team communications, automation tools and continuous delivery, DevOps teams are able to deploy changes to production more quickly and with greater accuracy. This enables businesses to quickly meet customer demands and improve the competitiveness of their products in the marketplace. In addition, DevOps practices also allow teams to reduce the number of bugs that make it into production by testing new features more frequently, improving the quality of their products.
Continuous Improvement
DevOps teams continuously seek to make their applications lean and efficient. This involves identifying and eliminating waste in workflows, tools and processes. It also involves incorporating best practices and knowledge sharing for continual improvement. Continuous improvement requires collaboration between teams to ensure the effectiveness of their processes and tools.
The operate phase of the DevOps lifecycle focuses on maintaining, monitoring and troubleshooting applications in production environments. This requires vigilance, rich telemetry and actionable alerting to identify issues and mitigate them quickly when they arise. It also requires a focus on security and governance to ensure the integrity of both applications and the underlying system.
A core aspect of the operate phase is integrating development, testing and deployment into a single pipeline. This streamlines processes and reduces the risk of manual steps causing delays. It also helps ensure the consistency and quality of code changes by ensuring only validated code is deployed into production.
The operate phase also includes using automation to improve the performance of the pipeline and reduce manual steps and friction between team handoffs. According to Accelerate’s 2021 State of DevOps Report, high performing DevOps teams deploy code changes 6,570 times faster than low performers. These elite teams also experience less than 15% failure rate for code changes compared to low performers’ 25%. This is a result of effective practices, including using CI/CD, to automate testing, integration and deployment.