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Introduction to DevOps
Introduction
Software development and its release on the market follow a critical process. Different units collaborate during the software development life cycle. During the software development life cycle, software developers and Information Technology (IT) professionals follow a set of practices while communicating with each other. These common practices and rules are referred to as Development and Operations (DevOps); which builds an appropriate environment that ensures that the entire software development and operations cycle can be carried out quickly and efficiently.
DevOps has four values: Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing. Based on these DevOps values and principles, software developers at different stages of software development communicate with each other to release software and later provide support for the same. Some DevOps principles are as follows:
- End-to-end software is developed and tested in a production-like environment
- Builds are deployed frequently
- Each module is continuously tested for quality and output as it is processed
- Each developer must understand the end product completely and work towards it in a uniform manner
- Developers are required to try and fix the issues on their own rather than being dependent on other developers
- The entire product cycle should be automated
- All teams of IT professionals must work in collaboration
Need for DevOps
Today, almost every organization is dependent on IT or software and has different IT sections or departments. Almost every project has an IT component involved in it and out of the total cost spent on a project, half of the cost is spent on IT. At the same time, IT departments are bound to be extremely active in responding to the changing and urgent needs of the market. Also simultaneously they need to provide efficient and secure IT services.
If there is no DevOps, the coordination in the sector is completely lost. Suppose. Software developers manually deploy code or write code with no automated testing. This code will ultimately fail in the testing phase and it will lead to critical doubt. Finally, the coordination between development and operations will be greatly lost. So, the two units need continuous coordination to ensure a proper workflow. DevOps provides this workflow to ensure that everything goes smoothly, securely, and efficiently.
During the entire software life cycle, developers might come across several deployment errors. An effective approach to reducing such deployment errors is to perform smaller deployments frequently. Organizations that use DevOps have greater performance and profitability as compared to those that do not employ DevOps. Thus DevOps ensures that the business units within an organization use the latest models and continuously coordinate with each other to achieve results.
DevOps Challenges
Today, many IT companies are following DevOps practices which are helping them to evolve faster and work more efficiently. The organizations that have not yet adopted DevOps do understand its need and they want to move towards it. However, it is not that easy and fast, as the teams have to make a lot of changes to their work habits. Moving towards DevOps is a smooth and gradual process. Lists a few challenges that organizations usually face while moving towards DevOps.
1. Culture:
DevOps should be considered an evolution rather than a revolution. A collaborative culture should be created among the units. Finding employees who understand DevOps well and have worked on it before serves as a helping hand to combat the culture challenge.
Rather than applying DevOps practices to the entire software model, it is always advisable to remodel a small product of an existing application. Gradually, the teams will observe the benefits and changes and they will gain confidence to adopt DevOps in the future too. At the same time, other teams will also want to adopt new working styles and move towards DevOps practices.
2. Test automation:
One of the important practices of DevOps is to perform testing continuously. This ensures continuous improvements to the end product while interacting with other units.
3. Legacy systems:
Organizations are bound to use older infrastructure and legacy systems. If they want to move to DevOps, they have to use the infrastructure that it supports. Otherwise, they will fail to provide the services their customers require. Ultimately, it will lose its business and the one that offers innovative services will win.
Moving ahead of traditional legacy systems and adopting new microservices ensures faster development and quicker innovation.
However, organizations need to have good configuration management to handle the increased operational workloads that these microservices bring.
4. App complexity:
Moving toward DevOps adds a lot of complexity to the infrastructure as the Dev and Ops units have to cope with completely separate toolsets and metrics. So, the two units have to research and understand the logical point where the two units can integrate the tools and create uniform metrics.
It should also be ensured that whichever tools are being used, are aligned with the goals of the organization. Similarly, appropriate application architecture changes should be made.
5. No DevOps plan:
As DevOps practices are all new for organizations that do not adopt DevOps, first they must create a clear plan that includes a project using it; they do not have a proper DevOps plan. So, if they want milestones and well-defined deliverables.
6. Managing environments:
Organizations need to create and maintain appropriate environments suitable for DevOps. They can use cloud sandboxes and other tools to do this.
7. Skillset:
As DevOps is a completely new infrastructure, teams need to be trained on DevOps practices. A standardized process needs to be created for teams to adapt to changes.
8. Budget:
Changing from traditional workflow to DevOps is not that easy. Handovers between different teams are expensive and it does cause a delay in the project timeline. This will ultimately cause some loss. Hence, the project budget should be made feasible to adopt DevOps.
9. Tools:
A fragmented tool set should be avoided.
10. Executive support:
All teams should be given proper information about the benefits of DevOps. Seminars and presentations can be arranged for the same.
DevOps Patterns and Anti-patterns:
Patterns:
The implementation of different DevOps practices is known as a pattern. Different organizations follow the DevOps pattern differently. However, the basic DevOps pattern is commonly used by most organizations.
Anti-Patterns:
Each new implementation has a lot of positive as well as negative questions. While some organizations have started using DevOps, many organizations have started using it but have several anti-patterns.
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