This article is a beginner’s guide to DevOps. Know more about DevOps practices, the role of DevOps in engineering teams, and their benefits.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. DevOps is a mix of Development and Operations that combines people from a distributed stack and tools used to create efficient applications with the development process to enable faster delivery of quality products. By bringing together the people, tools, and processes, DevOps enables rapid development and delivery with a scope of incremental features added to the product. The DevOps model combines the Development teams and Operations teams to bridge the gap between the ‚ siloed ‚ processes. Sometimes people across these processes work in a combined team to develop and deliver faster to achieve business goals. Simply put, a single team consisting of developers having skills from coding, deploying (using various tools and applications), and maintaining the application working together over the development life cycle to deploy a product faster. Incremental features are added to the application to keep it up to date with the latest trends for customer satisfaction. DevOps enables a combination of major parts of application creation, namely development, quality, deployment, security, into one single process using various DevOps tools to enable faster delivery of applications. Due to a multitude of skills in the same process working together, the product delivery is faster. It is easier to add updates and features to stay up to date with market standards and maintain quality and customer satisfaction. Due to increased delivery speed, faster releases of new features are possible. Hence fixing bugs, adding/updating features, and adding to products based on market need and customer feedback is now possible, enabling applications to deliver effectively in competitive markets. Due to faster delivery, DevOps practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery allow software reliability, i.e., new features ensuring quality are rapidly added to the application while users continue to get a smooth and quality experience. Due to rapid delivery and reliability, add to your application to make it scalable as per business need without compromising the user experience. As the developers and operations teams share responsibilities to achieve faster delivery, collaboration improves. Teams can add and improvise based on shared responsibilities, reducing the wait time between handovers and dependencies. DevOps provides a range of security and compliance testing/managing tools so that you can improvise your application without sacrificing security. Terms of software have changed from supporting a business’s online presence to becoming a key aspect of the business. In such a market, an application must stay up to date with the latest demand and dynamically adapt to trends to promote the business and achieve customer satisfaction. The DevOps model allows the flexibility to deploy a business-ready application faster and add or update the application based on customer needs. By closing the gap between various parts of the application development process, DevOps enables fast deployment of high-performance, rapidly enhancing, and secure applications. Adapting DevOps with the right tools and the right mindset is important to implement and utilize the DevOps model successfully. DevOps is an evolving model that adapts to organizational needs based on varying strategies. The agile mindset supports DevOps and an iterative development model. A few DevOps models are Agile, Scrum, Kanban, etc. Changes are continuously made to the code base, and new code is added based on new requirements, customer feedback, etc. Builds and tests are automatically run to ensure the changes are per required standards and adhere to previous functionality. Continuous integration provides all developers access to the code base, with new changes regularly rolled out, allowing easy refactoring wherever needed. Learn more about the benefits of continuous integration on your team. As the code base is updated, builds and checks are performed to check it’s working. Code is then moved to a pre-production environment and tested until it is ready for production. Therefore, a production-ready code is always present with the team, with new updates added frequently. Read on how to set up your CI/CD pipeline from scratch for your project. Microservices architecture breaks down a single application into small services that interact with each other over a secure network.
