Devops-Bridge between Development and operations
What is DevOps?
DevOps is defined as a set of processes that merges both software development and operations. DevOps reduces the time required for delivering a software product with good quality. It uses tools of CI/CD(Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) to deliver a good quality software product. The usage of these tools makes the organisation provide a software product in less duration. They can serve the customers in a better way by solving post-delivery problems(problems which occur after delivering the software f product). Every phase of the software development life cycle is handled in a better way compared to the traditional software development process.
Why DevOps?
Now let us see why many companies are shifting their focus on DevOps. To understand this, first, we should know how software is developed before DevOps came into the market. The following steps explain the process of software development:
1) Identifying the problems: In this phase of SDLC(Software development life cycle) inputs are gathered from stakeholders, customers, industry experts and some programmers. By these inputs, we can know the positives and negatives of the current system, and we can obtain a goal for developing the software.
2) Planning: After fixing the goal, we should develop the best plan to achieve that goal. In this phase, the team will gather the requirements and determines the budget of the software product. It also identifies the risks involved and provides the steps to be taken for reducing those risks. For all these activities, a document known as SRS(Software Requirement Specification) is created.
3) Designing: In this phase, software requirements are converted into a design plan. All the stakeholders who are involved in software development will review the design, and they will give their inputs if necessary. It is essential to gather the inputs from stakeholders regarding the design plan, because failure at this stage may lead to the collapse of the entire project.
4) Developing: In this phase of SDLC, the software is developed by generating the required code. After the successful generation of code, an executable file comes as an output from this phase
5) Testing: After developing the software, it is tested to fix the error or bugs present in that software. Software is tested until it meets the required quality measures.
6) Deployment: After testing the software, it is deployed to limited users.Depending on the feedback from that user’s adjustments are done.
7) Maintenance: After releasing it to the customers, maintenance of the software comes into the picture. Support of software is related to releasing updates of the software, making end-users aware of the features of the software.
The above phases of the SDLC(Software Development Life cycle) describe how software is developed before the invention of DevOps. These steps tell us how every activity of software development is carried out separately. But DevOps combines the development and operations of the software product. Before the DevOps software development team and software testing team is separate, but DevOps combines them, and this improves the collaboration between them.
DevOps combines the development and operations team to solve post-delivery problems. Once the software is delivered to the customer, developers are least bothered about it. After product delivery customers or end-users will communicate with the operations team of the organization. The operations team cannot answer the modifications or defects raised by the customers. This leads to the involvement of the developer in the post-delivery phase. So, DevOps combines these two teams, so that they can serve the end-user in a better way,
How DevOps Works?
In the above section, we discussed that DevOps combines both development team and testing team, let us see how it works. DevOps has many aspects, but the following capabilities make it working successfully, they are:
Collaboration: Instead of rising fingers at each other, development and IT operations team work together. Due to this collaboration, the stake of each team in software development is increased. This leads everyone to work efficiently during the software development process. Not only development and operations teams but all teams, including testing, product management are also combined.
Continuous integration: As DevOps is developed from an Agile environment, we can find continuous integration in the DevOps Environment. Continuous integration merges the source code updates continuously from all the members of the developing team. This integration reduces code conflicts.
Automation: DevOps depends heavily on the tools. DevOps depends on toolchains to automate a larger chunk of the end-to-end software development.
Continuous Testing: In DevOps, testing is not limited to QA team. It starts in the development phase. Developers will define test sets along with quality code. QA team will configure the testing environment, and they will perform the testing activity on the given test sets. In continuous testing, the main objective is to speed up the testing process. Continuous testing will enhance the quality of the software product.
Continuous Delivery: In DevOps, another critical aspect is continuous delivery. Continuous delivery is achieved when changes in code are automatically built, tested and are prepared to deploy or release. Due to this, continuous delivery organizations can have multiple deployments per day. Continuous delivery will also improve the quality of the product.
Continuous Monitoring: In DevOps continuous monitoring team will monitor the software product to identify the root cause of the errors. Continuous monitoring starts in the development phase. The tools which are used in the development phase monitors the product to rectify the mistakes before it goes into the production environment.
Benefits from DevOps
Organizations who have adopted DevOps are gaining the following benefits:
1)Stability: High performing organizations are spending less time on rework; they are spending more time on new work like adding new features to the product.
2)Security: Organizations are spending less time on resolving their security issues.
3)Deployment Speed: High performing organizations have multiple deployments in a day.
Conclusion
Almost after ten years of DevOps invention, we can say that it is a revolution in the software development process. It is a revolution because it has combined every aspect of the software development process into a single workflow which has a common goal of meeting customer requirements. Software developers and system administrators stopped fighting, and they started supporting each other. Business managers are happy as they are able to meet the quality standards. Because of these gains, Devops is ruling the software industry.