DevOps Model Defined

The word DevOps is derived from development (Dev) and operations (Ops), DevOps is the union of processes, people, and technology to continually provide value to customers.

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, tools, and practices that increases an organization’s ability to deliver services and applications at high velocity: evolving and enhancing products at a faster pace than organizations while making use of infrastructure management processes and traditional software development. This speed helps organizations in competing more effectively in the market while serving their customers better.

What does DevOps mean for teams?

What does DevOps mean for teams? DevOps enables formerly siloed roles—development, IT operations, quality engineering, and security—to coordinate and collaborate to produce better, more reliable products. By adopting a DevOps culture along with DevOps practices and tools, teams gain the ability to better respond to customer needs, increase confidence in the applications they build, and achieve business goals faster. 

How DevOps Works

Under a DevOps model, operations and development teams are no longer “siloed.” Sometimes, these two teams are combined into a single team where the engineers work across the complete application lifecycle, from development and test to deployment to operations, and develop a range of skills not limited to a single function. 

In some DevOps models, security teams and quality assurance may also become more tightly integrated with development and operations throughout the application lifecycle. When the focus of everyone is security on a DevOps team, this is sometimes known as DevSecOps.

These teams make use of practices to automate processes that historically have been slow and manual. They use a technology tooling and stack, which helps them evolve and operate applications reliably and quickly. These tools also help engineers independently achieve tasks (for instance, provisioning infrastructure or deploying code) that usually would have needed the help of other teams, and this further increases a team’s velocity.

Benefits of DevOps

Rapid Delivery

The frequency and pace of releases need to be increased, so users can improve and innovate their product faster. The quicker they can fix bugs and release new features, the faster they can respond to their customers’ needs and build a competitive advantage. Continuous delivery and continuous integration are practices that automate the software release process, from build to deploy.

Speed

Move at a high velocity so users can innovate for their customers faster, adapt better to changing markets, and become more effective at driving business results. The DevOps model assists developers and operations teams in achieving these results. For instance,continuous delivery and microservices let teams take ownership of services and then release updates to them swifter.

Scale

Users can operate and manage their development processes and infrastructure at scale. Consistency and automation help users in managing changing or complex systems expertly and with reduced risk. For instance, infrastructure as code helps users manage their development, production, and testing environments in a repeatable and more effective manner. 

Reliability

Users should make sure the quality of infrastructure and application updates changes so they can reliably deliver at a faster pace while maintaining a positive experience for end-users. Users should utilize practices like continuous delivery and continuous integration to ensure each change is functional and safe. Monitoring and logging practices help users stay informed of performance in real-time.

Security

Move quickly while preserving compliance and retaining control. Users can implement a DevOps model without sacrificing security by making use of configuration management techniques, fine-grained controls, and automated compliance policies. For instance, utilizing infrastructure as code and policy as code, users can define and then track compliance at scale.

Improved Collaboration

Build more efficient teams under a DevOps cultural model, which emphasizes values such as accountability and ownership. Operations teams and developers collaborate closely, combine their workflows, and share many responsibilities. This saves time (e.g., reduced handover periods between developers and operations, writing code that takes into account the environment in which it is run), and reduces inefficiencies.

DevOps Practices Explained

There are a few essential practices that help organizations in faster innovation through streamlining and automating the infrastructure management processes and software development. Most of these practices are achieved with proper tooling.

One basic practice is to perform small updates from time to time. This is how organizations innovate faster for their customers. These updates are most times more incremental than the irregular updates that are performed under traditional release practices. Small but frequent updates make each deployment less risky. They assist teams in addressing bugs faster because teams can notice the last deployment that caused the error. 

When to adopt DevOps?

DevOps should be utilized for large distributed applications like applications hosted on a cloud platform or eCommerce sites. 

When not to adopt DevOps?

DevOps should not be used in a mission-critical application like power, bank, and other sensitive data sites. Such applications need access control policy to the data centers, a detailed change management policy, and strict access controls on the production environment.

DevOps Lifecycle

DevOps is a deep integration between development and operations. There is a need to understand the intricacies of DevOps before learning the DevOps lifecycle. 

Here is brief information about the Continuous DevOps lifecycle: 

1. Development

In this stage, the development of software takes place regularly. In this phase, the entire development process can be categorized into small development cycles. This helps the DevOps team in speeding up the software delivery and development process. 

2. Testing

QA team makes use of tools like Selenium to detect and fix bugs in the new piece of code. 

3. Integration

In this DevOps stage, new functionality is integrated with the prevailing code, and testing takes place. Continuous development is only possible due to testing and continuous integration. 

4. Deployment

In this DevOps phase, the deployment process takes place nonstop. It is performed in such a way that any changes made at any time in the code should not affect the functioning of a high traffic website. 

5. Monitoring

In this phase, the operation team will take care of the inappropriate system behavior or bugs that are found in production. 

About the Author

Mayur Rele is a cloud automation expert and cybersecurity leader that has a wide experience in overseeing global technology, cloud infrastructure, and security in healthcare, e-commerce, and technology companies. Mayur graduated with an M.S. in Computer and Telecommunications Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology and is an active IEEE researcher and contributor.

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