What is DevOps?

Basically, DevOps integrates Team Developers and Team Operations to improve productivity and collaboration. According to Cloud Academy Blog, DevOps is a philosophy of the efficient development, deployment and operation, of the highest quality software possible. It prioritizes collaboration in order to perform continuous development, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and monitoring the processes continuously by using different tools, which bridges the gap in between the teams and dispatches the work for a quicker release. Thus, it allows the organizations to rapidly respond to the modifications in the business requirements.

The table below states how DevOps addresses the problems of Team Developers.

Dev Probs	DevOps Solution
Waiting time for code deployment.	Continuous Integration ensures there is quick deployment of code, faster testing, and speedy feedback mechanism.
Pressure to work of old, pending, and new code.	Thus, there is no waiting time to deploy the code. Hence, the developer focuses on building the current code.

The table below states how DevOps addresses the problems of Team Operations.

Ops Probs	DevOps Solution
Difficult to maintain uptime of the production environment.	Containerization & Virtualization ensure there is a simulated environment created to run the software as containers offer great reliability for service uptime.
Tools to automate infrastructure management are not effective.	Configuration Management helps you to organize and execute configuration plans, consistently provision the system, and proactively manage their infrastructure.
Number of servers to be monitored increases.	Continuous Monitoring
Difficult to diagnose and provide feedback on the product.	Effective monitoring and feedback system are established through Nagios. Thus, effective administration is assured.

In order to implement DevOps, you need to utilize helpful DevOps tools like Docker, GIT, Jenkins, AWS, etc. They are used for automation purposes at different stages which contributes in attaining Continuous Development, Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Monitoring to deliver high quality software to the customer at a very quick pace. These tools has been grouped into different stages of DevOps. For more information, please see the diagram below:

Continuous Development:

This is the stage in the life cycle of DevOps where the software is developed continuously. The software deliverables are divided into multiple sprints of short development cycles, developed, and delivered in a short amount of time. This stage involves the Coding and Building phases and utilizes tools such as Git and SVN for rertaining versions of the code, and tools like Maven and Ant for building the code into an executable file that can be sent to the QAs for testing.

Continuous Testing:

This is the stage where the software is continuously tested for any bugs or errors. For Continuous Testing, automation testing tools like JUnit, TestNG, Selenium, etc. are used. These tools make way for the QAs to test a variety of code-bases thoroughly in parallel to verify that there are no errors in the functions of the code. During this phase, use of Docker containers for actual simulation of test environment is preferred. Once the code is tested, it is continuously integrated with the existing code.

Continuous Integration:

This is the stage where the new code (with new functions) is integrated with the previous code. Since there is continuous development of software, the new code has to be integrated continuously with the systems to apply the changes to the users. The modified code, should also make sure that there are no errors in the runtime environment, which allows us to test the modifications and verify how it behaves with other changes. Jenkins is one of the most popular tools used for Continuous Integration. Via Jenkins, you can pull the latest revised code from a GIT repository and produce a build that can be deployed to pre-prod or production server. In addition, you can set to trigger a new build automatically when there is a change in the GIT repository.

Continuous Deployment:

It is the stage where the code is finally deployed to the production environment. It is ensured that the code is pefectly deployed on all the servers. It is also the responsibility of the systems administrator to scale up the servers to host additional users when there are new added functionalities. Since the new code is deployed on a continuously, configuration management tools play a vital role for performing tasks frequently and rapidly. Puppet, Ansible, and Chef are some of the most used tools in this stage. Containerization tools like Docker and Vagrant also play a vital role in the deployment stage as they help autoscaling instances and maintain consistency across Development, Test, Staging and Production environments.

Continuous Monitoring:

This is a very crucial stage in the DevOps life cycle which is aimed at improving the quality of the software by monitoring its performance. Tools utilized are Nagios, Splunk, Elk, etc. which help check the health of the system proactively. Continuous Monitoring involves the help of Team Operations who will monitor for bugs or improper behavior of the system. Thus, improving productivity and increasing the reliability of the systems. All major issues detected could be communicated to Team Developers in order to resolve issues.

In summary, the key to appreciating DevOps lies in the intention of DevOps, that is to produce superior-out-of-this-world-quality software, with more reliability and more rapidly while integrating collaboration between Team Developers and Team Operations.

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