DevOps is officially the unification of development and the operations part of a software evolution journey. DevOps is the software development life structure that encourages a healthy collaboration between the project development and the operational team. It implies the production to be carried out in a faster and automated manner. It generally elevates the business speed to deliver the services and applications. It helps in making the organizational work culture friendly and helps them to serve their customers in a better way. Scrum plays a central role in the DevOps life cycle. Project scrum analyzes the task and divides the task into a number of small sprints and assigns the task to each of the team associates. Earlier in the previous development models, development and testing needed to be carried out in a separate fashion, but DevOps enabled all the process development phases to be carried out in a synchronized manner. DevOps offers a significantly lower failure rate of new releases.
DevOps Principles
Few principles need to keep in mind before anyone opt for DevOps software development Lifecycle model:
- Customer centric actions: Customer centric is the core principle adopted by the DevOps team. It should always revolve around the requirements of its customers and should uninterruptedly invest in the products and services related to the customers.
- End to end responsibility: The DevOps team provides the lifetime support to the product till its turnover time. This will have a significant impact on the product quality and ensures its long-term stability in the market.
- Continuous improvement: The continuous improvement for the products significantly minimizes the wastage ratio. If the product is under the constant monitoring by the right authorities, it will improve the product speed and performance.
- Works as one team: For the DevOps development lifecycle, the roles for the software designer, developers and QA team are pre-defined. The major task in front of all the associates is to work in coordination and collaboration with each other.
- Testing and monitoring everything: It is very crucial for DevOps software development team to have testing procedures and robust monitoring.
DevOps life cycle
DevOps typically refers to the strong interaction between development and operations. In order to have a detailed understanding of DevOps, it is necessary for one to analyze the DevOps cycle. DevOps cycle is generally split into 5 phases, which are discussed as follows:
- Development: The DevOps cycle generally initiates with the development phase. Here software development takes place uninterruptedly. In this phase, the primary focus is to split the major development task into a number of small sprints and then tracking the progress of each individual sprint. Due to this, it significantly improves the process development and delivery speed.
- Testing: The testing typically refers to finding and locating the bugs in the application. Usually developers perform unit testing for each unit in the development phase, but the system testing is done by the QA team. The various tools such as Collis tool, Selenium are used by testers to resolve the defect.
- Integration: This is the most crucial phase that is related to the deployment of the process. It involves merging new functionalities with the existing code and handing it over to the QA team. Because of continuous integration and testing, unremitting development is feasible.
- Deployment: It refers to the introduction of the application in the actual market. Just like other phases, deployment phase in the DevOps model should take place continuously. The changes are carried out in such a way that it should not affect the already existing network traffic.
- Monitoring: The monitoring phase relies on the various operations performed by the operational team. They take care of the unusual and malfunctioning of the system behavior and verify the various defects which are encountered in the production phase.
Benefits of DevOps
Undoubtedly merging the development and operational team into a single unit provides a few benefits and involves the completion of the task in an adequate time. A few of the benefits of incorporating DevOps framework are discussed as follows:
- Speed: Due to the integration of both the development and operation platforms, the operational speed increased. It enables the developers to achieve a higher rate of output. Due to increase in velocity rate, the communication hindrances between the employee and the employer are resolved. Due to an adequate communication flow, it will speed up the development process.
- Improved customer experience and satisfaction: The prime motto of DevOps is to deliver the upgraded quality output to the end user and to speed up the managerial process. Obviously this will help in increasing the sale and revenue. DevOps is the vehicle that helps you to take part in the digital transformation for the ever increasing customer requirements and the business needs.
- Breaking down the Silos: In this article, everywhere I discussed for the short time DevOps objectives. But in term, opting DevOps as the development and operational platforms plays a considerable role by breaking down the silos that will result due to the hierarchical organizational model. It is beneficial for eroding the differences between the development, operational and the QA team.
- Continuous delivery cycle: Due to the continuous monitoring, the final output codes are sooner introduced in the production cycle. This will minimize the wide separation bridge between the requirement gathering and the production phase. DevOps provides a common platform for synchronizing the IT as well as production cycles. Also the use of the DevOps makes it possible for the developers to perform testing at the end of each phase.
What is the future of DevOps?
A few of the most prominent changes which are likely to be happening in DevOps world are as follows:
- Businesses migrate their requirements from years to months.
- DevOps are now transformed as an imperative key skill for the IT professionals.
- Sooner end customers will be more dependent on DevOps engineers as compared to other associates in the enterprise.