What is DevOps and Why use this Approach to Development?

DevOps is an application that is covering several philosophies, tools, and practices that can deliver services and application in a better and faster way. With the help of DevOps, it is possible to enhance the quality and deliver services in a better. They are better than the traditional practices and approaches that are used in an organization. The software management and development practices have seen a wide change in the last few years.

Even the companies that are using the DevOps can observe better customer services and provides a competitive edge in the market. Now, the development and operation teams have combined together to use the DevOps approach for the software development. They both are now working together to cover all the phase of the software development lifecycle from planning to deployment and leaving it in the live environment for a user to use.

Many companies are combing the teams to help them to understand the skill set used in the technology. Now in DevOps practice, the operation team understands concepts and technology such as testing, source control and agile development that were used by developers during traditional approach. With time, DevOps has gone beyond the internet start-ups phase and is now counted in the list of technology that is used widely by organizations.

The term DevOps is a combined form of Development and Operations. Here Dev is referred to as the complete team members that help in the development of a product. This includes the complete team including quality assurance, product development, software testers, and other members involved in the development phase. The Ops symbolizes system and database administrations, system engineers, security experts, network and release engineers, etc.

Advantages of DevOps

1. Speed: DevOps has helped in speeding up the innovation process. Even when the market changes, you will be able to abreast with everything. It will provide effective results and more productivity in the business.

2. Reliability: The DevOps Model has made the updating process of an application easy. Now, it is not a nerve-wracking task to make any change in the infrastructure or to deliver software by maintaining proper quality as per the user requirement.

This has been done to improve the user experience. The practices that have made it easy to test all the functionality and keep the security of software in mind are - continuous integration and delivery. The real-time performances metrics are other aspects that are used to maintain the reliability of software by monitoring and logging.

3. Quick Delivery: The DevOps approach has increases the frequency of the project immensely which in turns have helped in delivering software in an efficient and faster rate. The product innovation has helped in the delivery in a lot better manner than expected. It has improved the response of a customer and provided a competitive edge to the business. Also, it has improved the features that allow in the quick fixing of bugs and release the application in the live environment.

4. Scalability: DevOps practice includes the consistency and automation at a new level. This has managed to lower the risk while the team is making any changes in the requirement of a system or managing the total complexity of a project.

5. Security: DevOps has improved an application in such as manner that allows a user to move at a fast pace without compromising on the control and acquiescence of an application. Even the policies that a DevOps provides are automated that gives a hold on the control, management, and

6. Level of collaboration: The DevOps philosophy is emphasizing the vital values of accountability and ownership in order to come up with experienced team members. This results in the close collaboration of the team that helps in sharing the responsibility of a project and manage the workflow. The combination helps in preventing any type of inefficiency that usually occurs in a project when it is transferred to the operation team.

Phases of DevOps Maturity

1. Waterfall Development: This method was extremely used in the traditional development and operation phase. In this, the codes were written by the development team member in the span of 3-4 months. Then, they combined those codes to release them in the environment.

However, when a different number of codes were combined together then that results in coming up with many bugs which took over a month to change them before the integration process. This was not an ideal approach which results in lower productivity rate.

2. Continuous Integration: Then, the continuous integration approach comes into play. In this, the codes written by developers are integrated quickly with the main code so that software can be released. This approach helps in saving time as the team keeps on integrating the code to release.

This term was introduced to the coding world as an agile engineering practice that was used as the methodology of extreme programming. Then, DevOps adopted the term so that they can successfully execute the integrated program to the release. In this, the code is checked, using usable codes to compile the code and then perform validation testing methods.

3. Continuous Delivery: This is the second stage of the DevOps continuous integration. In it, developers add some of the testing or automation techniques that help in keeping the merging between the codes with the main code. The code will be ready to deploy with no manual interference. This allows a company to stay in the ready-to-deploy phase continuously.

4. Continuous Deployment: This is the final and advanced form of the delivery process. There is no manual interference while deployment of the production goes on. When a team is using the continuous delivery phase then they don’t deploy any code without testing. These codes first have to undergo the automated testing phase and then move to the live

However, all users are not allowed to check the software as the only limited audience can use it. Then there a loop of automated feedback that is, later on, tracked and monitored to check the use, reliability, and quality before the code is launched for everyone.

Key tools used in DevOps:

1. Source code repository: Here developers can check and change codes so that developers don’t have to write the code again and again for other projects.
2. Builder server: This tool is used to compile the code in the source code repository in the executable code base.
3. Configuration management: It is used to configure an environment or server by using tools such as Chef and Puppet.
4. Test automation: In this, the developers test the modules of the software to keep the track continuously so that they are sure that an application is ready to deploy.

DevOps has made it easy to eliminate all the small hurdles that kept a developer hooked in his seat for many days. It has also managed to remove the entire problem that was faced by the developer and operation team while communicating the project. It has bought reliability between the teams by increasing the efficiency and consistency. The customers are now able to receive better service and development and operation team is able to meet their goals in a much efficient manner.

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