Shades of DevOps - Related Job titles

 

What is DevOps ?

 DevOps in simplest terms is “how you build and deploy your software”.

It is about the culture that your team members live, the principles that guide your development process, the set of practices you follow to automate and speed up your delivery, the mindset you demonstrate to achieve complete customer satisfaction.

We all know, the word DevOps is a shortened acronym of Development and Operations. In essence, it is bringing together your software development team and operations team to work towards a common goal and have a unified vision. Their collective focus is always the product or the application which is being developed, rather than individual performances or targets.

In the DevOps world, Dev and Ops don’t work in silos anymore, but rather work in collaboration, as a single unit more efficiently and effectively. They perform their specialized roles effectively, but possess an end-to-end visibility of the whole process. Blame-game is replaced by mutual admiration and celebration of each other’s success. Challenges are solved together and continuous and rapid software delivery becomes the ultimate aim.

The assured benefits of DevOps philosophy are rapid software releases, shorter development cycles, reduced risks, quicker issue resolution, and better productivity. DevOps is a logical extension to agile and the main force behind the dynamism exhibited by many tech-giants for their extraordinary high performance. Shared responsibility, agile processes, automated tasks, smarter workflows, fearless innovation and continuous feedback are the driving factors of a DevOps approach.

DevOps is definitely not about “unlearning” how you have been developing software, but it is about “learning the new dynamics of software development” – improvising the existing processes, prioritizing tasks, changing perspectives and looking at the larger picture from organization’s benefit rather than individual accomplishments.

A DevOps team will also begin from requirements and go until deployment, code and test software, but they will integrate and automate the steps to make the whole process seamless, faster and productive. Let us now understand each of these steps in detail.

THE IMPORTANT PHASES IN A DEVOPS CYCLE

• Continuous Development
• Continuous Testing
• Continuous Integration

• Continuous Deployment
• Continuous Monitoring
• Continuous Feedback

Continuous Development

Software functionality is implemented and the versions of code is maintained using Version Control tools like Git, SVN, CVS etc.

Maintaining versions helps the developers to collaborate on the latest committed code and to rollback to previous versions in case of an unstable deployment.

Continuous Testing

Automation Testing is an efficient way to ensure code is thoroughly tested before it is released to production. Tools like Selenium, TestNG, Junit/NUnit are used to automate the test cases execution which saves time and effort. Reports generated help in defects analysis.

Triggering the entire automation testing process is vital and hence, the Continuous Integration tools come into the picture.

Continuous Integration

Developers commit their code after each update, to a shared code base and each integration is verified by an immediate build to minimize integration errors. It is undoubtedly the most crucial phase of DevOps cycle which holds it all together.

Popular tools are Jenkins, Bamboo and Hudson where Jenkins is the most widely used. These tools orchestrate the DevOps cycle.

Continuous Deployment

This is the phase where the code is actually deployed in production-like environments. Continuous Delivery is the process where new versions of an application are deployed frequently. In Continuous Deployment, we deploy each successful build to production automatically.

Configuration Management and Containerization tools that help in Continuous Deployment are Puppet, Ansible, Chef, SaltStack, Docker etc.

Continuous Monitoring

Monitoring performance of an application is as vital as its development. Defects that are left during Testing phase have to be reported as bugs and dealt with.

Splunk, ELK Stack, and Nagios are some of the popular tools for monitoring. These tools help you minimize the impact of failures.

Continuous Feedback

Feedback is the synergist for organizational changes. DevOps feedback loop has transformed the complete software delivery by highlighting all the major issues and bottlenecks before the actual release. Feedback is an integral part of all phases.

Due to shorter development cycles, we get frequent feedback from users which helps us to adapt quickly to changing dynamics. Each time we integrate, we test, or we deploy and run, the data we gather, are important feedback mechanisms for constant improvisation.

                                                   WHAT LED TO DEVOPS ?

Every organization must innovate and constantly improve to stay competitive in this expeditious IT world. Whether you sell physical merchandise, provide some online services, or deliver values through a web-based application, your business definitely has to build some code, run it in production and manage some IT infrastructure at an ever-growing rate. But how do you achieve this?

As we all know, there were many challenges with the conventional waterfall process. Software development and IT operations were two separate units that worked independently. Developers coded their pieces in secluded environments with unique configurations.

IT operations then took all the software artifacts and put them together as a running application in deployment that had desirable attributes such as high availability, scalability, and security.

Clients, as well as production support, were typically unaware of what the developers and testers were working on and if the business requirements changed midway, incorporating them within timelines and assuring quality was very difficult. The teams always blamed other counterparts for faults and failures.

With manual internal processes and workflows, productivity is always hampered by process bottlenecks or other dependencies.

The agile methodology could address some of these issues as it bridged the gap between developers and testers but Operations was still a separate entity, resulting in a huge delay in deployment. Agile made the development process faster through smaller and iterative deliveries, but there was a demand to reduce time-to-market and assure supreme quality.

DevOps was thus born, merging development and operations under one umbrella and significantly accelerating software delivery and offering incredible benefits.

DevOps owes its conception to Patrick Debois who coined the term ‘DevOpsDays’ for his conference in 2009 which emphasized on the power of different teams working together as ‘ONE’. Since then, started a new wave in technology and DevOps gradually became the IT buzzword which every organization wanted to adopt and experience.

DEVOPS IS NOT A DIFFERENTIATING FACTOR ANYMORE RATHER AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT TO COMPETE AND SURVIVE IN THE IT INDUSTRY.

Benefits of DevOps

DevOps brings strategic shifts in processes, mindsets, culture, and collaboration and results in beneficial business outcomes.
IT Professionals with DevOps knowledge and expertise bring along important strategic skills that propels an organization’s culture.

The following benefits from DevOps will help an organization appreciate the impact of a DevOps approach, such as:

• Accelerated Time to Market
• Shorter development cycles
• Effective communication and collaboration
• Improved Product Quality and Higher customer satisfaction
• Reduced Deployment Failures and Rollbacks
• Reduced Time to Recovery
• Reduced Costs