What is DevOps?

[Sparkout Tech Marketing]

 

DevOps is an  English acronym for development and operations . It refers to a cultural and professional movement focused on communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and IT operations professionals.

The term first emerged at the Agile 2008 Toronto conference in a talk on “ Agile Infrastructure ,” where Yhens Wasna and Patrick Debois talked about misunderstandings that arose between development and systems teams  that delayed project delivery. Starting in 2009, the term became popular due to the celebration of DevOps days in Belgium, which were later replicated in several cities around the world.

But what kind of conflicts arise between development and systems?

The vast majority of software companies operate by keeping departments isolated from each other.

On the one hand there are the developers , who must develop a product as quickly as possible, without neglecting innovation and guided by a great tendency to change.

On the other hand, operations professionals must implement, configure and optimize resources for the correct functioning of the code, constantly seeking system stability.

As developers complete code packages, they hand them over to operations for deployment to a production environment. During this process, it is quite common for errors to appear, which ends in an exchange of reproaches, blaming each other.

While operations resolves the incident, new code continues to be sent from development to operations, which tries to slow down the process to stabilize and optimize the system as much as possible.

This imbalance ends up generating conflicts and delaying the delivery of the project , which represents an economic cost for the business.

And then comes DevOps

DevOps arises to promote communication between departments , seeking common interests of all parties, automating processes and facilitating continuous integration.

The application of its processes allows software to be manufactured more quickly, with higher quality, lower cost and a very high frequency of releases.

Lifecycle

The iterative life cycle in DevOps consists of the following stages or phases:

1. Build : In this phase of DevOps, software development solutions are constantly carried out. dividing the entire development process into small cycles. This benefits the DevOps team to accelerate the software development and delivery process.

2. Testing : The QA team uses tools to identify and fix bugs in new code on an ongoing basis.

3. Release : In this phase, the new functionality is integrated with the existing code and testing is carried out.

4. Deploy : In this stage, the deployment process takes place continuously. It is done in such a way that any change made at any time in the code should not affect the functioning of the high traffic website.

5. Operate : In this phase, the operation team will take care of inappropriate system behavior or errors found in production, always working on a solid and stable system.

6. Monitor : This last stage of a DevOps process is a permanent phase that applies to the entire complete cycle. Here the operation team will be in charge of defining the measures to monitor and control the health status of the applications and their infrastructure.

Is DevOps a methodology?

Some gurus define it as a methodology, others as a culture closely linked to agile methodology .

The reality is that they are a set of procedures that effectively require a cultural change in companies and that allow for more agile and efficient teams to be built.

But then, DevOps is not a profile?

No, although you see job offers that ask for “DevOps Engineers”, it is not about a person carrying out the tasks of a developer and a systems operator at the same time. It is about creating cross-functional teams with development and systems administration profiles with a comprehensive vision of technical environments and in-depth knowledge of automation tools .

And what about QA?

Since this series of procedures has been standardized and implemented in companies, quality departments have also undergone a transformation, some experts say almost making them disappear.

Traditionally, quality was always in charge of finding errors in a product already in operation, while integrated with DevOps, the objective is not to find them, but to prevent them , bringing forward new releases if everything is working or rolling back if errors are found.

Technologies to apply DevOps

If something characterizes DevOps, it is automation . Some tools such as Docker, Puppet, Jenkins or AWS Lambda are so associated with DevOps that it is difficult not to consider one or the other to accelerate development processes.

Because the process of organizing, testing, and deploying code from integration tools is automatic, cloud infrastructure can keep up with the pace required by applications in today's market.

What does a DevOps developer do?

We are  expert software development consulting firms of business software and all types of apps  both in Madrid and internationally. We ourselves, as DevOps developers , apply the DevOps methodology so, if you have any questions or need expert recommendations about your project, contact us now without any obligation.