DevOps Technology

Dev + Ops

What is DevOps Technology?

DevOps technology is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and information-technology operations (Ops) which aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. Academics and practitioners have not developed a unique definition for the term "DevOps." The term DevOps, however, has been used in multiple contexts.

DevOps as a job title

DevOps job is describing as an approach to work rather than a distinct role (like system administrator), job advertisements are increasingly using terms like "DevOps Engineer". While DevOps reflects complex topics, the DevOps community uses analogies to communicate important concepts, much like "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" from the open-source community.

Building a DevOps culture

Organizational culture is a strong predictor of IT and organizational performance. Cultural practices such as information flow, collaboration, shared responsibilities, learning from failures and new ideas are central to DevOps. Team-building and other employee engagement activities are often used to create an environment that fosters this communication and cultural change within an organization. Team-building activities can include board games, trust activities, and employee engagement seminars.

The 2015 State of DevOps Report discovered that the top seven measures with the strongest correlation to organizational culture are:

1. Organizational investment in DevOps

2. Team leaders' experience and effectiveness.

3. Continuous delivery.

4. The ability of different disciplines to achieve win-win outcomes.

5. Organizational performance.

6. Deployment pain.

7. Lean management practices.

What is DevOps?

DevOps has become an overloaded buzzword that means a lot of different things to a lot of people. That's a challenge when you are trying to understand what DevOps is or define DevOps. Instead of trying to define DevOps, we are going to describe the foundational concepts that different people associate with DevOps and the history of how the DevOps movement evolved to help you get a holistic view:

1. Where Did DevOps Come From?

DevOps is the offspring of agile software development – born from the need to keep up with the increased software velocity and throughput agile methods have achieved. Advancements in agile culture and methods over the last decade exposed the need for a more holistic approach to the end-to-end software delivery lifecycle.

2.What is Agile Software Development?

Agile Development is an umbrella term for several iterative and incremental software development methodologies. The most popular agile methodologies include Scrum, Kanban, Scaled Agile Framework, Lean Development and Extreme Programming (XP).

While each of the agile methodologies is unique in its specific approach, they all share a common vision and core values (see the Agile Manifesto). They all fundamentally incorporate iteration and the continuous feedback that it provides to successively refine and deliver a software system. They all involve continuous planning, continuous testing, continuous integration, and other forms of continuous evolution of both the project and the software. They are all lightweight, especially compared to traditional waterfall-style processes, and inherently adaptable. And what is most important about agile methods is that they all focus on empowering people to collaborate and make decisions together quickly and effectively.

3. What Are the Challenges DevOps Solves?

Prior to DevOps application development, teams were in charge of gathering business requirements for a software program and writing code. Then a separate QA team tests the program in an isolated development environment, if requirements were met, and releases the code for operations to deploy. The deployment teams are further fragmented into siloed groups like networking and database. Each time a software program is “thrown over the wall” to an independent team it adds bottlenecks. The problem with this paradigm is that when the teams work separately:

The Dev team that has a goal to ship as many features as possible, kicks a new release “over the wall” to QA. Then the tester’s goal is to find as many bugs as possible. When the testers bring their findings to Dev, the developers become defensive and blame the testers that are testing the environment for the bugs. The testers respond that it isn’t their testing environment, but the developer’s code that is the problem.

  

4. What Is the Goal of DevOps?

Improve collaboration between all stakeholders from planning through delivery and automation of the delivery process in order to:

Improve deployment frequency

Achieve faster time to market

Lower failure rate of new releases

Shorten lead time between fixes

Improve mean time to recovery

According to the 2015 State of DevOps Report, “high-performing IT organizations deploy 30x more frequently with 200x shorter lead times; they have 60x fewer failures and recover 168x faster.”

4.Where Are You on the DevOps Continuum?

The DevOps continuum is a helpful way to look at the different aspects of DevOps. The bottom horizontal axis represents what people perceive DevOps to fundamentally be focused on. Some people adamantly feel that DevOps should focus on culture more than tools, while on the other people tend to value tools over culture.

The vertical axis depicts the three levels of the DevOps delivery chain: continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment. The DevOps community refers to organizations in the top right of the DevOps continuum as pink unicorns because there are currently so few of them that you don’t see them in the wild very often. Popular examples of these unicorns are companies like Netflix, Etsy, Amazon, Pinterest, Flicker, IMVU and Google. In a recent poll participants indicated where their organizations fit on the DevOps continuum:

55% Bottom Left

26% Bottom Right

14% Top Left

5%   Top Right

Thought leaders, coaches and bloggers often portray a vision of DevOps in the upper-right corner and they will often have a strong bias towards either DevOps culture or automation tools. While it is ok to have esoteric debates about whether DevOps culture or tools are more important, the reality is that you can’t have DevOps without tools and all the tools in the world won’t help if you don’t have a strong supporting culture.

5. What Are the Phases of DevOps Maturity?

There are several phases to DevOps maturity; here are a few of the key phases you need to know.

Waterfall Development:

Before continuous integration, development teams would write a bunch of code for three to four months. Then those teams would merge their code in order to release it. The different versions of code would be so different and have so many changes that the actual integration step could take months. This process was very unproductive.

6. What Are the Values of DevOps?

DevOps focuses heavily on establishing a collaborative culture and improving efficiency through automation with DevOps tools. While some organizations and people tend to value one more than the other, the reality is it takes a combination of both culture and tools to be successful. Here’s what you need to know about these two DevOps values.

DevOps Culture

DevOps culture is characterized by increased collaboration, decreasing silos, shared responsibility, autonomous teams, improving quality, valuing feedback and increasing automation. Many of the DevOps values are agile values as DevOps is an extension of agile.

7. What Tools Are Used in DevOps?

Earlier we briefly discussed some of the tools used in DevOps; here are some of the key tools and practices you need to know.

Source Code Repository

A source code repository is a place where developers check in and change code. The source code repository manages the various versions of code that are checked in, so developers don’t write over each other’s work.

Configuration Management

Configuration management defines the configuration of a server or an environment. Popular configuration management tools are Puppet and Chef.

DevOps Model Defined:

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.

How DevOps Works

Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams are no longer “siloed.” Sometimes, these two teams are merged into a single team where the engineers work across the entire application lifecycle, from development and test to deployment to operations, and develop a range of skills not limited to a single function.

In some DevOps models, quality assurance and security teams may also become more tightly integrated with development and operations and throughout the application lifecycle. When security is the focus of everyone on a DevOps team, this is sometimes referred to as DevSecOps.

These teams use practices to automate processes that historically have been manual and slow. They use a technology stack and tooling which help them operate and evolve applications quickly and reliably. These tools also help engineers independently accomplish tasks (for example, deploying code or provisioning infrastructure) that normally would have required help from other teams, and this further increases a team’s velocity.

Benefits of DevOps

Speed 

Move at high velocity so you can innovate for customers faster, adapt to changing markets better, and grow more efficient at driving business results. The DevOps model enables your developers and operations teams to achieve these results. For example, micro-services and continuous delivery let teams take ownership of services and then release updates to them quicker.

Rapid Delivery

Increase the frequency and pace of releases so you can innovate and improve your product faster. The quicker you can release new features and fix bugs, the faster you can respond to your customers’ needs and build competitive advantage. Continuous Integration and continuous delivery are practices that automate the software release process, from build to deploy.

Raliability

Ensure the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes so you can reliably deliver at a more rapid pace while maintaining a positive experience for end users. Use practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery to test that each change is functional and safe. Monitoring and logging practices help you stay informed of performance in real-time.

Scale

Operate and manage your infrastructure and development processes at scale. Automation and consistency help you manage complex or changing systems efficiently and with reduced risk. For example, infrastructure as code helps you manage your development, testing, and production environments in a repeatable and more efficient manner.

Improved Collabration

Build more effective teams under a DevOps cultural model, which emphasizes values such as ownership and accountability. Developers and operations teams collaborate closely, share many responsibilities, and combine their workflows. This reduces inefficiencies and saves time (e.g. reduced handover periods between developers and operations, writing code that takes into account the environment in which it is run).

Security

Move quickly while retaining control and preserving compliance. You can adopt a DevOps model without sacrificing security by using automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques. For example, using infrastructure as code and policy as code, you can define and then track compliance at scale.

Why DevOps Matters?

Software and the Internet have transformed the world and its industries, from shopping to entertainment to banking. Software no longer merely supports a business; rather it becomes an integral component of every part of a business. Companies interact with their customers through software delivered as online services or applications and on all sorts of devices. They also use software to increase operational efficiencies by transforming every part of the value chain, such as logistics, communications, and operations. In a similar way that physical goods companies transformed how they design, build, and deliver products using industrial automation throughout the 20th century, companies in today’s world must transform how they build and deliver software.

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