Fundamental Concepts of DevOps

DEVOPS

DevOps are the resulting product of agile software development. This concept was created to keep up with the increased software velocity. To support the end-to-end software delivery lifecycle, DevOps of agile software plays a major role. To know DevOps in detail let us have a brief about agile software development;

Agile Development is an iterative and incremental software development methodology. Some of the popular agile methodologies are Kanban, Scrum, Scaled Agile Framework®, and Lean Development and Extreme Programming. Each methodology is unique and has a specific approach. These methods involve continuous planning, testing, integration, and other features of a project and the software. They are inherently adaptable and differ from traditional waterfall-style.

The DevOps methodology extends agile development practices by streamlining the concept of software change through build, validate, and deploy & delivery stages. DevOps always encourages communications, collaboration, integration, and automation to help in improving the speed and quality of delivering software. The main aim of DevOps team is standardizing development environments and automating delivery processes. This process helps in improving delivering predictability, efficiency, security, and maintainability. DevOps mainly finds its application in understanding the production infrastructure and production environment.

Now let us understand the advantages of DevOps;

Problems encountered due to Dev where knowledge gap in QA and Ops read-blocks prevent the program from working. The other software problems which can lead to inefficiency can be resolved by DevOps. The main responsibilities like to maintain the system that runs on the system with maximum quality feedback and automation issues. Some of the goals of DevOps include;

• Effective deployment frequency
• Achieving faster time to market
• Low failure rate
• Improvement of mean time to recovery

Among multiple phases of DevOps maturity some of the key phases are listed below;

1. 1. Waterfall Development: It is a sequential design process in which progress is like flowing steadily downwards. In this sequential phase of conception, initiation, analysis, design, construction, testing, production/implementation, and maintenance are included. The advantages of the waterfall model are it allows for departmentalization and control, easy to use, each phase has specific deliverables and review process. This model works well for small projects.
      
   2. Continuous Integration: in this phase, the developers integrate code into a shared repository very frequently. This phase provides rapid feedback so that if a bug is found in a codebase it can be identified and corrected. It is used to automate the testing and building a document trail. Some of the benefits of continuous integration are smaller code changes, fault isolation, faster mean time to resolution, faster release rate, etc.
      
   3. Continuous Delivery: It deals with building, testing and releasing software with maximum speed and frequency. The advantages of this phase are reduced cost and time, minimized risk of delivering changes. This phase is an approach to automate the delivery aspect and mainly look into bringing different processes together. Some of the tools used during deployment pipeline in this process are; continuous integration, build automation, application release automation, and application lifecycle management.
      
   4. Deployment: this is the process in which a software system is available for use. The deployment includes various interrelated activities that involve possible transitions between activities. Usually, deployment can be defined in simple as a general process that has to be customized as per specific requirements or characteristics. This phase includes some of the activities which include release, installation & activation, deactivation, un-installation, updating, built-in update, and version tracking.

Fellow viewers let us not discuss some of the values of DevOps. At most DevOps mainly focus on establishing a collaborative culture and aims in improving efficiency through automation. The two main DevOps values are;

1. DevOps Culture: It is sectioned by increased collaboration, minimized silos, shared responsibilities, autonomous teams, best quality, valuing feedback and increasing automation.
2. DevOps Tools: This consists of configuration management, test & build systems, application deployment, version control, and monitoring tools. Continuous integration, delivery, and deployment involve different tools. Let us now explore some of the necessary DevOps tools;

• Source Code Repository: It a platform where developers check-in and change code. The source code repository helps in managing different versions of code that are checked in. It is a key component of continuous integration. Some of the tools are Git, Cloudfroce, Bitbucket, and TFS.
• Build Server: this is an automation tool that compiles the code in the source code repository into an executable code base. Some of the build server tools are Jenkins, SonarQube, and Artifactory.
• Configuration Management: This describes the configuration of a server. Well-known configuration management tools are Puppet and Chef.
• Virtual Infrastructure: This is provided by cloud vendors and includes APIs to help in creating new machines programmatically. Some of the examples of virtual infrastructures are Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
• Test Automation: This is an old practice that focuses on automated testing. In this process, testing is done within the build pipeline so that the time consumed for the deployable build will bring some accurate deployment. Some of the popular test automation tools are Water and Selenium.
• Pipeline Orchestration: It is defined as a manufacturing assembly line from the time of designing until the deployment of code in production or late stage of the pre-production environment.
• Unifying Enterprise Software Development & Delivery: Well known unifiers are VersionOne VS that help in unifying agile application lifecycle management and DevOps. This process intern help in providing a perfect picture of the entire software delivery pipeline under a single platform. Others include VersionOne® Continum™ mainly for DevOps, it is an enterprise continuous delivery solution that is used for automating, orchestrating, and visualizing the flow of change in the software delivery cycle.

These were some of the key concepts, culture, tools, and usage of DevOps in the software development process. In Altorum Leren we focus on providing high-quality DevOps services that help in building a profitable business environment.