Development operations, commonly known as DevOps, is creating a buzz in the information technology industry (IT) since the practice was conceptualized a few years ago. In practical terms, DevOps aims to streamline and improve software product and service development processes in a more holistic manner by encouraging team collaboration.
According to DevOps.com, some 66 percent of the IT organizations incorporated DevOps in their processes in 2015. After a noted efficacy in improving overall procedures, the figure increased to 74 percent a year later. These days, the IT sector has seen more companies relying on DevOps for overall business development.
Let’s find out what DevOps means and what problems it aims to address.
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What Is DevOps?
To put it simply, DevOps is a practice that aims to integrate software product and service development and business operations. DevOps is a set of procedures that aims to digitize and consolidate the processes between IT and software development teams. It entails building, testing, and releasing a software product in a more efficient manner and in a shorter period. In big companies, engineering and security teams can likewise become part of the broader team in the DevOps working principles.
What Are The Main Objectives Of DevOps?
Before initiating DevOps processes, it’s important to identify goals to set the team’s directional processes. When done correctly, DevOps strategies are able to fulfill the following goals:
- Save time. DevOps saves valuable time without compromising quality. In addition, the coding & operation teams have their separate timelines that aren’t on line with the other departments, which often leads to further delays in product delivery.
- Seamless project implementation. DevOps facilitates a smooth flow of the project.
- Promotes collaboration. Teams from different departments work together to achieve unified goals. Before employing DevOps, team members were spending a large chunk of their time in software testing, deploying, and designing instead of the actual building of the project.
- Early error detection. Allows development teams to tweak specific aspects of the product early on in the process
- Ensures product security. Because of the tight protocols in place, DevOps assures security is maintained at all times.
- Targets efficiency. The continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) process encourages increased efficiency in producing software products and services
- Better output. DevOps can attract more clients as a software development company implementing this process builds its reputation.
How Is It Done?
For several years, IT teams operated in “silos”, where each team focuses on specific goals and participated only in functions that concern them. This led to some serious issues, where both the development and operations teams ended up working based on various methods, budgets, and objectives.
DevOps aims to address the issue of fragmentation in each of these departments. Teams coming from software development and operations departments are divided into small groups in such a way that all subgroups count persons from either group as members.
By acting as one, operations team members get familiar with software development principles, including agility and automation. Developers, on the other hand, are given the opportunity to discover the product’s infrastructure and how the processes go. Essentially, workers from operations and development departments will have to understand how their colleagues work and find ways to act together to solve all the kinks.
In doing this, team members can implement vital software development processes such as CI/CD, facilitating faster bug fixes and a quicker product release.
What Are The Common DevOps Methods?
For DevOps to meet its main objectives, the following tools and methods are typically employed:
- Continuous integration and continuous delivery or continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools
- Real-time monitoring
- Incident management systems
- Configuration management
- Collaboration platforms
- Cloud computing like with dedicated servers Australia
DevOps can also be integrated with the following:
- Agile software development
- IT service management frameworks
- Other project management tools
What Are The Expected Benefits Of DevOps?
- Collaboration: This is the core of DevOps implementation. By facilitating better coordination among developers and the operations teams, DevOps encourages teamwork, foregoing the complexities that come with a software product or service.
- Swift product delivery: Errors are easily detected as the product is in the development process. This contributes to faster delivery of the product because the team doesn’t have to start from scratch or undergo a tedious product review and testing procedure to detect technical glitches.
- Better project management: Managing a large-scale software project may be a daunting task. However, DevOps can help streamline various development processes.
- Improves the company’s reputation: Along with faster and efficient product delivery, more firms are likely to engage with a software development company practicing DevOps.
As the IT industry becomes more competitive, software development firms can count on DevOps as a tested and proven technique to stay ahead of the competition. By dividing complicated tasks among teams from development and operations departments, the challenges of delivering a product or service based on the clients’ needs become more efficient and less daunting.
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