By implementing DevOps, software development organizations can develop and deliver stable applications with thoroughly tested functionality comparatively faster, quality output within budget when compared with organizations using traditional approach towards software development and operations.
Take a quiz to respond to the below questions to determine does your software development organization really needs DevOps?
Do you have in house development and testing team?
Have you partially and completely outsourced development and testing?
Do you have separate departments/teams for development, testing, quality assurance, infrastructure, and security?
Do you experience insufficient coverage by your test team?
Does the application have a high probability of post-release errors?
Do business users have a lack of trust in the quality of the application and delay manual user acceptance testing?
Does your team take weeks for updates and fixes for defects?
Does your infrastructure team take longer to set up development, testing, production environment than your expectations?
Do you struggle and always exceed your budget for delivery?
If the response to all or majority of questions is ‘Yes’ then its highly recommended that you consider the DevOps approach to your software development organization and create a business case considering the effort, time, and budget required for DevOps to be successful in your organization. Your plan must contain the adoption of new technologies needed for the DevOps initiative to be successful. The most tangible benefit DevOps will bring is delivering software more rapidly without compromising on quality.
By implementing DevOps, software development organizations can develop and deliver stable applications with thoroughly tested functionality comparatively faster, quality output within budget when compared with organizations using traditional approach towards software development and operations.
The benefits of implementing DevOps are as follows;
The teams of developers, quality assurance, system administrators work in alignment with each other.
The infrastructure as code will allow faster creation of identical infrastructure for development, testing and production thus eliminating defects pertaining to infrastructure.
The unit, functional and integrated testing is automated and thus reduce the time taken to test and fix defects.
Application release processes are automated will reduce the time to deploy the application.
The software development organization is able to gain more end-user confidence due to improvement in the quality of output.
What is ‘NOT’ DevOps?
Automation of the exiting process
Adoption of DevOps tools
Redesign of the software development organization
What is DevOps?
The DevOps is a new culture towards application delivery and efficient processes, The entire software development organization need to adopt continuous testing, as well as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices to accelerate software delivery and increase its quality by automation of processes, adopting DevOps tools and redesigning of software development organization as appropriate.
DevOps Implementation
Once an organization decides to adopt DevOps as a culture, they will need to have a strategy and plan to implement the same. IT director initiates a DevOps as a part of the IT department program. Thus, the IT department gets an opportunity to make changes in the development and operations activities the least painfully for the entire company. IT Director will arrange financial investments, human resources in the most optimal way. A dedicated program manager becomes responsible for designing the DevOps strategy and monitoring its implementation.
Building the DevOps strategy
The Program Manager would utilize people, best processes and practices to improve interdepartmental collaboration and utilize tools and infrastructure for provisioning of infrastructure for software development and testing.
People & Processes
Organize development, testing, design, operations, and other teams in a shared working DevOps environment, making all the members focus on the common goal and outcomes of the software development cycle of delivering high-quality application within scheduled timeline and within budget
Infrastructure-as-a Code
Implement Infrastructure as a Code to ensure on-demand provisioning of IT infrastructure This will allow DevOps practitioners to get consistent infrastructure for development or testing in one click, as well as avoid human errors that often result from the manual configuration of IT infrastructures.
Automation
Automate software building, unit testing, application testing via UI, software integrating, deploying, and releasing processes to speed up the software development-testing-releasing cycle.
Containerization
Containerization solves the problem with the reliability of applications such as it helps to avoid carry the entire environment required for the application to run Containers include everything required to run an application, i.e. all the dependencies, libraries, configuration files. The isolation of the containerized parts of the application from IT infrastructure ensures application stability regardless of the differences in the environments they are put in. Moreover, since the building blocks of applications such as database, business logic, user interface are put into several containers, it is easier for an operations team to manage the application since they have no need to rebuild the entire application when the changes are required in one of its components.
Integrating infrastructure automation with CI/CD tools
When an application is put into containers, the containerized application needs to be managed and infrastructure automation tools are integrated with CI/CD tools for efficient configuration management and application deployment.
Application performance monitoring
The Application Management Team or the operations team needs to monitor the performance of the application. The DevOps tools provide transparency overall performance issues, e.g., slow response, memory leaks, runtime errors. The issues may be revealed during application server monitoring, user experience monitoring, Application performance monitoring allows detecting, prioritizing and isolating application defects before end users find them, as well as finding the root causes of the errors quickly with the use of special application monitoring software,
Conclusion
To achieve the benefits of DevOps, organizations will need to transform both the software development process and IT infrastructure arrangement. DevOps helps to make IT infrastructure reliable due to the strong collaboration between the DevOps teams and the alignment between the development, testing, and production environments and flexibility due to the adoption of DevOps practices like Continues integration and continuous delivery, infrastructure.
