What is DevOps?
The combination of “development” and “operations” known as DevOps has brought about a cultural change closing the gap between two major teams that had historically functioned separately. This relationship reflects a culture that fosters collaboration between both teams to automate and integrate processes between software development and IT teams in order to build, experiment and project software in the shortest possible time.
Thanks to this, the capacity of a company or institution to provide almost immediate applications and services is also increased, allowing them to better serve their clients and compete more efficiently in the market. The teams can use innovative practices to automate processes that were previously carried out manually, always relying on tools that help them manage and optimize applications faster.
DevOps can operate under a variety of models where even QA and Security teams can be integrated into the mix of development and operations teams, from development and testing to application deployment. This is especially common when security is a priority in a project.
How do I know if I need DevOps?
If your company or organization is going through any of these situations, it is quite likely that you will need to implement a dynamic DevOps:
- The development team is having trouble optimizing old code, creating new code, or preparing new product features.
- Disparities between development and production teams have caused errors and compatibility failures.
- The improvements that were implemented (related to the software deployment) are currently obsolete.
- Your company is experiencing a slow time-to-market, that is, the process that goes from code development to production is too slow and inefficient.
How to carry out a DevOps implementation process
Adopt a DevOps mindset
Identify areas where your company’s current delivery process is ineffective and needs to be optimized. This will be a great opportunity to bring about real change in your organization, so you must be open to experimentation. Learn from possible short-term failures, they will help you improve; do not get used to accepting inefficient dynamics solely based on “tradition”.
Take advantage of the metrics
It is important to choose the correct metrics to verify and monitor the project. Do not be afraid to measure what might not look good at first, since this is what will help you notice real progress, as well as real commercial benefits.
Accept that there is no single path
Each organization must go through different DevOps circumstances linked to its business and culture, where the way they should do things will depend more on how patterns and habits within teams can be changed than the actual tools used to enable automation.
Don’t leave QA aside
Companies that implement DevOps often focus on automating deployments, leaving QA needs aside. Although we know that not all tests can be automated, it is essential to automate at least the tests that are run as part of the continuous integration process, such as unit tests or static code analysis.
Learn to look at automation from a smarter perspective
You can’t really speed up delivery processes without automating. The infrastructure, environment, configuration, platform and tests are written in code. Therefore, if something begins to fail or becomes ineffective, it is probably time to automate it. This will bring various benefits such as reducing delivery times, increasing repetitions and eliminating drift from the configuration.
Main benefits
There are several reasons why DevOps is useful for development teams, below we will examine the most important ones:
- Due to its high predictability, the DevOps failure rate is quite low
- This dynamic allows you to reproduce everything, in case you want to restore the previous version without problems
- If the current system is disabled or some new version fails, DevOps offers a quick and easy recovery process
- Time-to-market reduced to 50% through optimized software delivery. Good news for digital and mobile applications
- Infrastructure issues are built into DevOps, so teams can deliver higher quality in app development
- Security is also incorporated into the software life cycle, also helping to reduce defects
- DevOps leads to a more secure, resilient, stable and 100% auditable change operating system
- Cost efficiency during development is possible when implementing DevOps tools and models
- It is based on agile programming methods, allowing it to divide the base of the largest code into smaller and more adaptable snippets
Summary
Before DevOps arrived, development teams and operations teams worked in isolation, resulting in much longer times than it typically takes for a real build. This model was quite inefficient as testing and implementation was carried out after design and build, plus manual code deployment gave way to multiple human errors in production, further slowing down any project.
With the implementation of DevOps, the speed of development has been increased resulting in fast deliveries and higher quality updates; security has also been increased, making it one of the most reliable systems. Today’s digital transformation has increased the demands for software development, and DevOps has shown that it can cover all needs quite well and meet market expectations.