DevOps : A beginner’s introduction
Software development is not easy. It takes immense time and effort to build a fully functional software. And it takes even more time and effort to test it, debug it, maintain it and run it.
Reports from the software industry are always suggestive of the fact that the projects didn’t go as planned, or it didn’t meet the user’s expectation, or it didn’t deliver on time or the worst of all, the development team and operations team of the IT firm are contradicting each other.
A report from IBM stated, “31%of the projects get cancelled before they are completed, 53% overrun their cost estimates by an average of 189% and for every 100 projects, there are 94 restarts”
Over time, the software industry has tried to learn and evolve from its failures and tried implementing techniques and procedures that help it reduce failures and optimize the work. Principles such as Agile and Lean have become synonymous with the IT industries.
But still, even with the advent of technology, the software industry suffers from production lags, cancellation of projects, manual errors, the irregular release of updates, disputes between stakeholders and developers, disputes between their own developers and with the operations team, and succumbing to changing user requirements.
DevOps, as a Software methodology, improvises on the existing software development procedures to provide a robust, more efficient, and faster technique for software development. On the frontline, its main focus is on automation of routine tasks and improvement in collaboration between all the stakeholders, product managers, business owners, developers, and operations managers.
DevOps is a cultural shift and change of mindset that erodes the existing culture of working in silos, zero cross-functionality, and non-existent collaboration. It that focuses on the following aspects and refine them:
- Improvement in collaboration
- Improvement in feedback loops
- Accepting the fact change is inevitable
- Improved Time To Market
- Fewer Failures
- Automation of processes
DevOps, as a culture, changes people’s perception of software development. A traditional IT culture maintained the development team’s focus on developing and delivering newer features while it kept the operations team’s focus on running the system, maintaining availability, and promoting stability. This creates a wall between the development team and the operations team, who were working in silos, leading to a chain of problems such as increased failures, wastage of skills, poor feedback systems, non-inclusion of change, decreased customer satisfaction, increment in time and cost, and increased time to market.
DevOps maintains “Change is Inevitable”, and hence promotes smaller sprint(development) cycles and increased collaboration with the stakeholders and customers. This not only increases the quality of the software product but also enhances the customer satisfaction.
DevOps also increases speed. Deriving its base from Agile Software Development Practices, it further enhances the Software Development Life Cycle(SDLC) by promoting the automation of routine tasks. Automation removes manual errors, makes tasks reproducible, and increases the time to market. By incorporating automation tools, DevOps makes any SDLC an easy job.
Any DevOps lifecycle will include the following phases (The phases also lists some associated tools) :
- Source Code Management with Version Control
Git
SVN
SubVersion - Build and Release Management
Ant
Maven
Gradle - Automation of Testing and Test Management
Selenium
Cucumber
TestNG - Continuous Integration
TravisCI
Jenkins
Bamboo - Continuous Deployment
CodeCD
AWSCodeDeploy
ElasticBox - Configuration Management
Ansible
Chef
Puppet - Containerization
Docker
Kubernetes
AWS ECS - Continuous Monitoring and Analysis
Nagios
Zabbix
Kibana
- Security Management
Snort
TripWire
BlackDuck - Collaboration
Slack
Jira
Remedy - Deployment Management
Terraform
GoCD
Octopus Deploy
It’s important to note that the tools mentioned are not the only ones used in the industry. Each organization or SDLC can have varying uses of diverse tools. A good place to know about all available tools is DevOps Periodic Table by Zebia Labs.
The DevOps market is expected to grow from USD 4.1 Billion in late 2019 to USD 12.5 Billion by 2025, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 25.2%. The demand for DevOps is expected to be driven by several factors, such as lower costs, flexibility, agility, and fast application delivery.
So, it’s a great time to learn DevOps. DevOps will be the future of the Software Industry and it’s an inevitable fact. Get to know more about DevOps here.
