devops

DevOps stands on three pillars: culture, best practices and tools. For an organization to truly consider itself to have adopted DevOps, it needs to have adopted all three of these DevOps pillars, at least to some extent.

A DevOps culture is all about automation, communication, accountability, shared responsibility, and increased collaboration. With Development, IT and Operations working together as one team. This culture should include a safe environment that allows for trial and error, with an emphasis on early feedback and continuous learning. Moreover, it should provide each team with full accountability and yet offer a blameless approach.

DevOps standards and best practices are different in every company. Even different teams in the same company don’t adopt all the same practices. As long as the practices adopted are helping the company deliver better software faster, the goal of DevOps is served. Here is a list of practices that should be adopted in a move to DevOps.

• Developers Should Be Involved in Operations

  When developers are involved in Operations as part of a holistic and integrated team, they step out of their enclosed development environments and into the real world of production systems where their code is designated to run. By doing so, they can have a keen awareness of how changes in the code may affect the production infrastructure and make sure that changes to the code, as versions are delivered, do not have an adverse effect. Moreover, by having access to production systems, developers can take responsibility for monitoring and troubleshooting, and can even participate in being “on-call” if production issues arise.

• Operations Should Be Involved in Development

  When Operations are aware of code changes that are planned for development, they can anticipate how they might affect production infrastructure and ensure that developers consider factors such as hardware constraints, monitoring, deployment, troubleshooting, security and tooling needed for production systems.

• Version Control Everything

  Using version control systems for source code is widely accepted as a standard practice. In a DevOps environment the concept of “code” is extended to everything that is involved in production systems. So in addition to source code, you should version control software and hardware configuration files, settings, parameters and anything else that take part in your runtime systems.

• Be Agile With Changes in Infrastructure

  Using Agile methodologies for software development is commonplace, but they should also be used for infrastructure. Infrastructure should be treated and managed as code. Which means, changes should be versioned and applied in small, discrete steps, and at each step, your systems should be tested to ensure nothing has broken.

• Automate Everything

  Manual tasks and processes are error-prone and not scalable. In a DevOps environment, every change should undergo automation as part of a CI/CD pipeline. Everything that can be automated, should be automated. This includes automated deployment processes, automated testing procedures, and more.

• Continuous Integration/Delivery/Deployment

  A change at any stage of the software delivery pipeline, from development to production systems, should go through a CI/CD system. This ensures that if anything fails, there is a fast feedback loop leading to rapid recovery.

• Unified Tools and Platforms

  In DevOps, development, staging and production environments should use the same tools, configuration and hardware resources to the greatest extent possible. This is to ensure that anything that works in development will transition successfully to the staging and production systems.

There is an array of DevOps tools available on the market, with most falling into a discrete set of main categories. Since there are different ways to embrace DevOps, each organization will choose the categories and corresponding tools according to its specific requirements.

• Source Control

  Version controlling everything is a DevOps best practice, and it begins with source control tools. Naturally, in addition to versioning source code, the chosen tool can be used to version configuration files, settings and anything else that can be defined in a text file. And to stay in line with DevOps best practices, the same tool should be used for Developers’ source code as for Operations’ configuration scripts.

• CI/CD Pipeline Management

  Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment tools are critical to enabling automation that is at the root of short and rapid release cycles. Orchestrating the entire process, they are responsible for managing the complete flow of your application.

• Testing

  Testing is one of the fundamental phases of a DevOps lifecycle, and combining testing tools with Continuous Integration provides the test automation needed for the rapid feedback cycles of DevOps.

• Configuration Management and Deployment

  Tools like Docker, Chef, Puppet, Ansible and Terraform create the environment and configuration where you are running the system and testing.

• Binary Management

  A repository manager greatly reduces the enormous complexity of managing an organization's binaries, both those developed in-house as well as public open-source components downloaded from the cloud. It also speeds up builds thereby reducing release cycles. It’s important to use a repository manager that is universal and flexible enough to integrate seamlessly into all the DevOps ecosystems of your organization.

• Monitoring

  Continuous monitoring at every stage in the DevOps cycle is critical to early detection of faults and rapid remediation.

• Security

  Security is at the heart of DevSecOps and different tools are available for each of the stages in the DevOps cycle.

• Collaboration

  Collaboration and communication are fundamental to a DevOps culture. There is a variety of tools to help with messaging, ticketing, release planning and more.

Practicing DevOps benefits organizations in many ways, but people in different organizational roles may tend to focus on different benefits of DevOps. For example, the CEO of a company may look at the increased revenues and reduced costs that DevOps brings, while an IT manager may be more interested in a reduction in defects and faster release cycles. The following are some of the benefits of adopting DevOps practices.

• Reduced Change Failure

  When changes are small and distinct rather than large and sweeping, they are safer. Not only the chance of failure decreases, but the recovery time also decreases.

• Better Quality Products

  Products are deployed with fewer bugs, and since deployment is frequent and cycle times are shorter, products can be continuously improved more quickly.

• Lower Cost of Release

  With fewer bugs to fix, shorter cycle times, and a fully automated pipeline, the cost of deploying a release goes down.

• Less Time on Unplanned Work

  With fewer failures, all team members spend less time fixing unexpected issues.

• More Time on New Work

  With less time spent on unplanned work, all team members have more time to spend on innovation and new work.

• Faster Time to Market

  Shorter cycle times with fewer issues means that products can be released more quickly.

• Satisfied Customers

  Rapid release cycles means the ability to quickly fix defects and add new features that customers request.

• Increased Revenue

  If people are satisfied with your products, they are more likely to purchase more of them and recommend them to others.

• Robust Infrastructure

  Infrastructure that is modified in small steps, conducts testing at all stages and maintains versioning for configuration and settings is more stable and reliable.

• Higher Work Satisfaction

  Teams that are spending more time in new work and innovation will be more satisfied than those that are constantly bogged down with rework and bug-fixing.

• Reduce Waste

  Start small to reduce work. There is a common belief that the most waste in software is creating code that is not used. DevOps world, work in small chunks, reduces this waste, providing early feedback with short cycles.

• Faster and More Frequent Releases

  When everything is automated, code can move from development to production more quickly.