What is DevOps?
Development (Dev) and operations (Ops) are combined in DevOps to integrate processes, people, and technology in application design, delivery, development, and operations. (Ops). Previously independent tasks like IT operations, development, quality engineering, and security may now coordinate and collaborate thanks to DevOps.
To increase their confidence in the apps they create, enhance how well they satisfy client expectations, and advance more swiftly toward business goals, teams embrace DevOps culture, methodologies, and technologies. Teams can consistently offer customers value by developing better, more reliable products thanks to DevOps.
DevOps, a combination of the terms development (Dev) and operations (Ops), is the bringing together of people, processes, and technology to continuously deliver value to consumers.
How does DevOps affect teams?
Formerly isolated jobs such as development, IT operations, quality engineering, and security may now coordinate and work together to create better, more dependable products thanks to DevOps. Teams may more effectively respond to customer requests, boost confidence in the applications they produce, and accomplish business objectives more quickly by embracing a DevOps culture along with DevOps methods and tools.
DevOps Goals and Benefits
Teams that embrace the DevOps culture, methods, and tools develop into high-performing organizations that produce better products faster for happier customers. Increasing productivity and teamwork is essential to attaining company objectives like the following:
1. Speeding up time to market
Teams can significantly shorten the period between product conception and market launch through greater efficiencies, improved team cooperation, automation technologies, and continuous deployment.
2. Changing with the times and the competition
Teams must put the needs of the customer first in a DevOps culture. Teams may consistently provide value to their consumers and improve their competitiveness in the market by combining agility, teamwork, and a focus on the customer experience.
3. Keep the stability and dependability of the system.
Teams can increase the stability and dependability of their goods and services meeting continuous improvement processes. These procedures aid in lowering risk and failure.
4. Shorter average time to recovery.
How long it takes to recover from a failure or breach is shown by the mean time to recovery statistic. Teams should monitor and try to improve this metric to manage software failures, security breaches, and continuous improvement initiatives.
A lifecycle for applications and DevOps
DevOps has an impact on all parts of the application lifecycle, including planning, delivery, development, and operations. The phases don’t have defined roles; rather, they depend on one another. All responsibilities in each phase are somewhat involved in a DevOps culture.
Plan
DevOps teams conceptualize, define, and describe features and capabilities of the applications and systems they are developing during the planning phase. They monitor progress at both low and high levels of granularity, from jobs that cover portfolios of different items to tasks that are focused on a single product. DevOps teams use a variety of tools to plan quickly and visibly, including backlogs, bug tracking, Kanban boards, Scrum for managing agile software development, and dashboards for monitoring progress.
Develop
The write, test, review, and integrate phases all fall within the development phase, which also involves producing the code into build artifacts that can be deployed into multiple environments. Without compromising on reliability, consistency, or productivity, DevOps teams aim to innovate quickly. To do it, they employ highly effective tools, automate tedious manual tasks, and iterate incrementally using automated testing and continuous integration.
Delivery
Delivery is the process of reliably and consistently deploying software into production settings. The fully controlled underlying infrastructure that makes up those environments must also be deployed and configured during the delivery phase.
Teams design a release management process during the delivery phase, including distinct manual approval steps. In addition, they install automated gates that transport applications through various stages before releasing them to customers. These procedures become scalable, repeatable, and controllable when they are automated. Teams that use DevOps can deliver regularly while doing so quickly, confidently, and stress-free.
Operate
In the operational phase, applications in production environments are maintained, watched over, and troubleshot. DevOps teams work to improve security and governance while maintaining system reliability, high availability, and a target of zero downtime. When issues do occur, DevOps teams act quickly to identify them, address them, and minimize the impact on the customer experience. To keep up this vigilance, you need comprehensive visibility into apps and the underlying system, actionable alerting, and rich telemetry.
Take on a DevOps mindset
You must develop a DevOps culture to fully deploy DevOps. Profound adjustments must be made in the way people work and collaborate if a DevOps culture is to be fostered. Organizations that embrace a DevOps culture foster the development of high-performing teams. You won’t reap the full benefits of DevOps without a transformation to a DevOps culture within the organization and its employees, even though adopting DevOps methods automates and improves operations using technology.
The practices listed below are essential elements of DevOps culture:
- Cooperation between teams is a sign of a healthy DevOps culture, as are visibility and alignment. Visibility is the first step toward collaboration. Teams from development, IT, and other departments should communicate about their DevOps priorities, methods, and issues. They are better able to align on goals and success metrics as they pertain to the business by organizing their work together.
- Changes in scope and accountability: As teams come together, they assume responsibility for additional lifecycle stages in addition to the ones that are essential to their responsibilities and get active in them. For instance, developers are now responsible for both the performance and stability their improvements bring during the operation phase as well as the innovation and quality established during the development phase. The plan and development phase is where IT operators make sure to integrate governance, security, and compliance.
- less time between releases: By delivering software in brief cycles, DevOps teams maintain their agility. Because development is modest and easier to manage with shorter release cycles, there is less of an influence on system stability. Also, reducing the release period enables firms to respond and adapt to changing client needs.
- High-performing DevOps teams cultivate a growth mentality through continuous learning. They make quick adjustments after failing and apply their lessons. They work hard to maintain their current level of excellence, raise client satisfaction, and quicken innovation and market responsiveness.
Use DevOps techniques
DevOps is put into reality by adhering to the practices for the duration of the lifespan of the application. Several of these methods speed up, automate, and enhance a certain process. Others span multiple stages, assisting teams in developing streamlined procedures that boost production.
Integration and delivery in real-time (CI/CD)
Development teams automate, combine, and test their code using a process called continuous integration (CI). Bugs are less expensive to fix when they are found early in the development cycle thanks to CI. To guarantee the quality, automated tests run as part of the CI process. To facilitate frequent deployments, CI systems create artifacts that are fed into release workflows.
Code is created, tested, and released continuously to one or more test and production environments (CD). It improves the quality of deployment and testing in many settings. The infrastructure and applications produced by CD systems are deployable artifacts.
Version management
The process of managing code in versions while keeping track of changes and revisions to make it simple to examine and restore the code is known as version control. Version control tools like Git, which let several engineers work together to write code, are typically used in this procedure. These solutions offer a clear procedure to address conflicts, combine code changes that take place in the same files, and roll changes back to earlier states.
A key component of DevOps is the use of version control, which facilitates collaboration between development teams, assigns coding jobs to team members, and stores all code for quick recovery in the event of a problem. In addition, continuous integration and infrastructure as code both require version control as a key component.
Agile software development
Agile is a method of software development that places a strong emphasis on teamwork, user and customer input, and rapid changeability through brief release cycles. Agile teams continuously deliver updates and improvements to consumers, gather their feedback, and then learn from it and make adjustments in response to those needs and wishes. Agile differs significantly from other, more established frameworks like a waterfall, which features lengthy release cycles with distinct phases. Two well-known Agile frameworks are Kanban and Scrum.
Code for infrastructure
Teams can manage system resources and topologies as they would code by using infrastructure as code, which describes system resources and topologies in detail. In version control systems, the definitions can also be kept and versioned, where they can be checked out and undone—again, just like code.
Teams can deliver system resources in an accurate, repeatable, and controlled manner by using infrastructure as code. In addition to automating deployment, infrastructure as code lowers the possibility of human mistakes, especially in complex large setups. Teams may maintain development and testing environments that are comparable to production settings thanks to this repeatable, dependable method for environment deployment. The process of replicating environments across several data centers and cloud platforms is also made simpler and more effective.
Configuration control
The term “configuration management” relates to the control of a system’s servers, virtual machines, and databases. Teams can implement changes in a controlled, methodical manner using configuration management technologies, lowering the risks associated with changing the configuration of a system. Teams use configuration management tools to monitor system state and prevent configuration drift, which is the process by which a system resource’s configuration veers off from the ideal state specified for it over time.
Together with infrastructure as code, system definition, and setup can be easily automated and templated, enabling teams to operate complicated environments at scale.
Ongoing observation
Continuous monitoring entails having complete, in-the-moment visibility into the functionality and state of the entire application stack. Its visibility spans from the higher-level software components to the underlying infrastructure that powers the application. By gathering telemetry and metadata and setting alerts for predetermined circumstances that demand an operator’s attention, visibility is achieved. Telemetry is the collection of event data and logs from various system components and their storage for further analysis and querying.
To extract insights from massive amounts of data, high-performing DevOps teams make sure to establish relevant, meaningful alarms and collect extensive telemetry. These insights assist the team in resolving problems as they arise and in identifying ways to enhance the application in subsequent development cycles.
Planning
DevOps teams conceptualize, specify, and characterize the features and capabilities of the applications and systems they intend to develop during the planning phase. Teams monitor job progress at both low and high levels of granularity, from portfolios of a single product to several.
The following DevOps approaches are used by teams to schedule with agility and visibility:
- Make a backlog.
- Monitor bugs.
- Use Scrum to oversee Agile software development.
- Implement Kanban boards.
- Use dashboards to see progress.
See How Microsoft Plans with DevOps for a summary of the various strategies and lessons Microsoft used to enable DevOps planning throughout the organization’s software teams.
Development
The entire process of writing software code is covered in the development phase. DevOps teams perform the following responsibilities at this phase:
- Choose a setting for development.
- Code must be written, tested, reviewed, and integrated.
- Create artifacts from the code to deploy it in different settings.
- To work concurrently on code, use version control, typically Git.
- DevOps teams must innovate quickly while maintaining productivity, stability, and quality.
- Invest in effective tools.
- Automate tedious and manual processes.
- Use automated testing and continuous integration to iterate in small steps (CI).
Delivery
Delivering Applications into Production Environments Consistently and Reliablely, ideally through Continuous Delivery (CD).
DevOps teams throughout the delivery phase:
- Establish a release management procedure that includes distinct manual approval stages.
- Put up automatic gates to advance applications through different phases until they are released to clients.
- To make delivery procedures scalable, repeatable, controllable, and thoroughly tested, automate them.
The basic infrastructure of the delivery environment must also be deployed and configured. To create completely regulated infrastructure settings, DevOps teams leverage technologies like infrastructure as code (IaC), containers, and microservices.
Operations
Safe deployment procedures can spot problems before they have an impact on client satisfaction. DevOps teams can deliver regularly with simplicity, assurance, and peace of mind thanks to these techniques.
Maintenance, monitoring, and troubleshooting of applications in production environments, including hybrid or public clouds like Azure, are all part of the operations phase. System dependability, high availability, solid security, and zero downtime are the goals of DevOps teams.
Teams can immediately detect and address problems when they arise with the use of automated delivery and safe deployment procedures. Rich telemetry, actionable alerting, and complete insight into applications and underlying systems are all necessary for maintaining vigilance.
How Do You Guarantee DevOps Success in Your Company?
DevOps best practices for achieving efficient communication and cooperation, quicker operations, and bug-free code in a company include the following:
- Identify the requirements for implementing DevOps: Economic demands should be the driving force for DevOps deployment. It should be a requirement of your development process to meet your business objectives, not just because it is the current trend.
- Eliminate organizational silos to foster cooperation: DevOps strategies demand the elimination of functional divisions of labor among various IT specialties. Breaking down organizational walls promotes team contact and gives everyone access to information about completed projects, motivated personnel, and the results. Better decisions are made as a result, which boosts output and creativity.
- Put the needs of the client first: Organizations must continue to adjust to changing consumer demands and deliver services that satisfy those needs in terms of timeliness, functionality, and efficiency, if not surpass them. That is only possible if the business adopts a new culture that encourages collaboration, honest communication, and client happiness. Implementation, requirements elaboration, prototype development, module testing, and product deployment should all involve everyone.
- Instead of diving in headfirst, start modestly and rise through the ranks: To create quicker and shorter supply chains, use a DevOps technique, and then expand it. It is necessary to have faith in and acceptance of the DevOps vision to change the IT culture away from silos. Also, companies should upskill their current workforce rather than add new personnel.
- Automate as much as is required because it speeds up the SDLC implementation process and keeps DevOps operational. Automation is possible for code development, system configuration, database and networking changes, and crucial analyses like load and regression testing. Time and effort are saved by developers, inspectors, and operational staff, which lowers overall costs.
- Make a list of compatible tools: The interaction between the DevOps automation technologies and your IT architecture must be taken into account when choosing which ones to implement. Consider your company’s primary tool compatibility while carefully defining your design and manufacturing alternatives. The likelihood of disagreements between development and operations is decreased by appropriate tool selection.
- Set performance evaluations for the individual and the team: When the IT culture must be participatory, it is essential to assess both the productivity of the team and the individual. DevOps is built on cooperation and collaboration, thus developers and operations personnel should be judged primarily on their teams’ potential to carry out development and deployment objectives.
- Make sure the presentation of the project is in real-time: A cross-functional IT organization must have project management software that offers real-time visibility into a project or program. Good project management tools have automation built in that facilitates information gathering by identifying who and for what purposes the program’s existing services are needed.
- Continuous Integration and Delivery: Using DevOps without incorporating continuous Integration and continuous delivery will be ineffective and wasteful. Rapid deployment is a subset of continuous integration. The Continuous Delivery phase ensures that every new or modified feature is perfectly deployed to production by sending every update to a business that mimics production and confirming that the software functions as expected through rigorous test automation.
- Enhance performance through dialogue and evaluation: Constant observation is necessary to ascertain whether the program or application is operating as intended in a stable environment. DevOps is a set of procedures and equipment that enables a system to release software or applications quickly and efficiently while incorporating customer feedback to continuously improve.
DevOps Certification by Microtek Learning
Our environment is extremely competitive and moving quickly. We frequently see businesses prioritizing quick software delivery to meet customer needs. The quality of the software must not be compromised in the process, though. As a result, businesses are implementing software development methodologies like DevOps, which produce software more quickly while preserving the quality of the finished product.
A higher level and role-based certification, Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert, verifies your proficiency in developing a DevOps strategy, carrying out DevOps development processes, continuous integration (CI), and delivery. Azure DevOps experts who mix processes, people, and technology to continuously create valuable products and services that fulfill end-user objectives and company goals can achieve this certification from Microtek Learning.
The main benefit of the DevOps Certification Training Program is that it teaches you how to use a variety of DevOps tools, including Docker, Git, Jenkins, Puppet, Ansible, Nagios, and Kubernetes. Via continuous testing, continuous development, continuous integration, continuous monitoring, and configuration management of software throughout its development life cycle, this training is intended to help you become a certified practitioner.
Microtek Learning supports the development of a more intelligent workforce with the most up-to-date technological know-how and improved performance to maximize ROI. We offer complete, tested capabilities across the learning spectrum to businesses of all sizes and individuals globally. Via our extensive offers in IT & Management training, we address technological advances. Microtek Learning is supported in its efforts to establish a global presence in the training sector by our elite team of profound subject-matter experts and skilled teachers with real-world experience. We are a reputable name among professionals and decision-makers who aspire to grow skills, gain certifications, and accomplish business goals. Our targets include ongoing upgrading and bridging skill gaps