What is DevOps and benefits of team following DevOps practice?

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.
Teams who fully embrace DevOps practices work smarter and faster and deliver better quality to their customers. The increased use of automation and cross-functional collaboration reduces complexity and errors, which in turn improves the Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) when incidents and outages occur.

Purpose of DevOps team

A DevOps team includes developers and IT operations working collaboratively throughout the product lifecycle, in order to increase the speed and quality of software deployment. It's a new way of working, a cultural shift, that has significant implications for teams and the organizations they work for.

DevOps is an evolving philosophy and framework that encourages faster, better application development and faster release of new or revised software features or products to customers.

The practice of DevOps encourages smoother, continuous communication, collaboration, integration, visibility, and transparency between application development teams (Dev) and their IT operations team (Ops) counterparts.

This closer relationship between “Dev” and “Ops” permeates every phase of the DevOps lifecycle: from initial software planning to code, build, test, and release phases and on to deployment, operations, and ongoing monitoring. This relationship propels a continuous customer feedback loop of further improvement, development, testing, and deployment. One result of these efforts can be the more rapid, continual release of necessary feature changes or additions.

Some people group DevOps goals into four categories: culture, automation, measurement, and sharing (CAMS), and DevOps tools can aid in these areas. These tools can make development and operations workflows more streamlined and collaborative, automating previously time-consuming, manual, or static tasks involved in integration, development, testing, deployment, or monitoring.


Why DevOps matters

Along with its efforts to break down barriers to communication and collaboration between development and IT operations teams, a core value of DevOps is customer satisfaction and the faster delivery of value. DevOps is also designed to propel business innovation and the drive for continuous process improvement.

The practice of DevOps encourages faster, better, more secure delivery of business value to an organization’s end customers. This value might take the form of more frequent product releases, features, or updates. It can involve how quickly a product release or new feature gets into customers’ hands—all with the proper levels of quality and security. Or, it might focus on how quickly an issue or bug is identified, and then resolved and re-released.

Underlying infrastructure also supports DevOps with seamless performance, availability, and reliability of software as it is first developed and tested then released into production.




DevOps practices

DevOps practices reflect the idea of continuous improvement and automation. Many practices focus on one or more development cycle phases. These practices include:

Continuous development: This practice spans the planning and coding phases of the DevOps lifecycle. Version-control mechanisms might be involved.

Continuous testing: This practice incorporates automated, prescheduled, continued code tests as application code is being written or updated. Such tests can speed the delivery of code to production.

Continuous integration (CI): This practice brings configuration management (CM) tools together with other test and development tools to track how much of the code being developed is ready for production. It involves rapid feedback between testing and development to quickly identify and resolve code issues.

Continuous delivery: This practice automates the delivery of code changes, after testing, to a preproduction or staging environment. A staff member might then decide to promote such code changes into production.

Continuous deployment (CD): Similar to continuous delivery, this practice automates the release of new or changed code into production. A company doing continuous deployment might release code or feature changes several times per day. The use of container technologies, such as Docker and Kubernetes, can enable continuous deployment by helping to maintain consistency of the code across different deployment platforms and environments.

Continuous monitoring: This practice involves ongoing monitoring of both the code in operation and the underlying infrastructure that supports it. A feedback loop that reports on bugs or issues then makes its way back to development.

Infrastructure as code: This practice can be used during various DevOps phases to automate the provisioning of infrastructure required for a software release. Developers add infrastructure “code” from within their existing development tools. For example, developers might create a storage volume on demand from Docker, Kubernetes, or OpenShift. This practice also allows operations teams to monitor environment configurations, track changes, and simplify the rollback of configurations.

 

Sources: https://www.netapp.com/
Picture source: https://vilmate.com/

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