DevOps Is Taking Over IT. Here Is Its Meaning & Importance

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a cultural shift from a traditional software development lifecycle to collaborative work between Development Team and Operation Team, supported by proven practices and tools.

From 2020 to 2027, the DevOps market worldwide is expected to expand at a healthy CAGR of 22.9 percent. DevOps Development services and delivery model has great potential since it has already produced outstanding results for businesses.

What role Does DevOps play?

DevOps best practices promote smoother and more continuous processes, cooperation, incorporation, accessibility, and accountability between application development teams (Dev) and their IT operations (Ops) counterparts.

This robust synergy between “Dev” and “Ops” results in a seamless process from initial software planning to code, building, testing, and releasing, and then rollout, operational procedures, and continuous assessment.

Various teams are encouraged to take responsibility for a product’s entire lifecycle. The DevOps teams work autonomously, embracing a software engineering culture, workflow, and toolkit that elevates operational requirements to the same level as architecture, design, and development. Developers gain a deeper understanding of user needs and requirements as they become aware of those who build and run them. Operational teams can add maintenance requirements and customer needs to the development process.

DevOps culture emphasizes transparency, communication, and collaboration between traditionally isolated teams.

Are you ready to leverage its benefits? Then keep reading!

In this blog, our top professionals at Covrize will explain Azure DevOps service, methods, processes, and some best practices!

Three popular methods for implementing DevOps – Let’s find out!

1) Kanban Method

Kanban methodology is a well-known project management method for implementing the Agile approach. The Kanban method promotes real-time communication, complete transparency of work, and aesthetic advancement for the organization.

A Kanban board is an effective project management tool that tracks and displays improvements as companies work and improve efficiency by using boards, cards, columns, and the mobility of cards within those columns.

A Kanban board is the way to go if you want something highly visual and straightforward. Kanban boards assist teams in taking tiny steps toward a greater goal and identifying performance bottlenecks.

2) Agile Method

Agile Methodology is a people-centered, results-oriented DevOps approach that recognizes the quickly shifting world. It is adaptable, quick, and strives for continuous quality improvement.

Agile has broken down large-scale projects into smaller, bite-sized milestones that speed up the workflow regularly and allow for continuous improvement through feedback.

It eliminates the risk of spending years or months on a procedure that eventually fails because of a minor error you made earlier. It involves making changes on the go to eliminate hassles in the future.

3) Scrum Method

Scrum is an agile methodology that assists organizations in facilitating team collaboration and simplifying complicated operations.

Scrum is another helpful DevOps method that adheres to the same agile method principles while eradicating the common mistakes of the traditional waterfall development phase.

Scrum addresses work difficulty by making it more understandable and straightforward, allowing teams to check and make adjustments based on current conditions rather than anticipated situations.

According to the Scrum method, cross-functional groups should work on development through a sequence of sprints to ensure a high-quality product and allow the DevOps team to adjust to changes along the way.

7 Stages/Phases of DevOps lifecycle

As a result of DevOps, the two teams are more tightly integrated. By providing direct access to production deployment environments, the ops team can allow developers to troubleshoot and fix issues directly in production. As well as liaising with operations, they can share DevOps best practices.

As a result, teams develop rapport, work together, and reduce the time required to resolve software deployment issues.

Both development and operations are included in the same process when applying DevOps. Agile software development teams often exclude deployment and other operations components from this process. In these parts of the system, outdated waterfall models are used.

The DevOps life cycle can look like this after some planning.

7 DevOps best practices that you should know about!

1)   Continuous Development

The fundamental aim of Continuous Development is to keep a record of continual improvement, strategize, check, and gather data to enhance the product. As a result, recognizing Continuous Development is essential for ensuring that all of your DevOps processes are functioning correctly.

DevOps culture revolves around automation. A CD pipeline also aids in the automation of the entire coding, constructing, checking, and releasing procedure. It helps shorten the development, pushes code into production regularly, and generates trustworthy and safe software.

The process automates most tasks and adds significant value to your software development process.

2)   Continuous Integration (CI)

Continuous Integration (CI) is the essential DevOps procedure and allows software companies to design and deliver software in very short development cycles.

CI is a continual process wherein codes from various contributors are incorporated into the Central Repository. It enables developers from Covrize to constantly combine code changes at any given time.

What is the significance of this procedure?

• When the code size is relatively small, it is always simpler to identify any mistakes or issues than to discover any deficiencies in a huge code.
• It enables you to use automated tools to see whether or not the code in the system is accurate.
• It enables faster procedure implementation.
• Make quick quality feedback accessible to all.

3)   Continuous Testing

Test automation is a crucial DevOps practice because it allows for continuous testing throughout its lifecycle. Continuous monitoring refers to testing sooner in the pipeline, frequently, and across multiple environments and devices.

It assists businesses in detecting bugs early in the pipeline when they are easy and less expensive to fix. As a result, continuous testing aids in delivering high-quality software at a rapid pace, at a lower cost, and with fewer errors.

Best-in-class automation testing at Covrize helps streamline repetitive tasks, create innovative test cases, and collaborate with devs to avoid mistakes.

It also entails acknowledging test case situations, favoring test cases, selecting appropriate automation tools, configuring ecosystems, and constantly evaluating results from pre-deployment to post-deployment.

4)   Continuous Deployment (CD)

Developing the source code again & again consumes a lot of effort and time, which we could save by using continuous deployment.

Continuous deployment is an automated method of implementing code in different manufacturing environments. It includes development, builds, evaluating, build-testing, implementation, and post-deployment.

The Operations team at Covrize implements code in the production environment after it passes various QA test cases. Continuous deployment entails releasing code in stages rather than all at once. The most remarkable feature is that they require little human assistance.

Quick Tip: To automate implementation, you can use various tools, such as Ansible, Jenkins, chef, Spinnaker, Harness, and others.

5) Continuous Delivery

Continuous Delivery (CD) is all about discharging code updates on a regular and timely basis. The purpose of Continuous delivery is to keep source code deployable at any given time. That means the project may not be completed 100% but if in case there is a need we can deploy the fixes without removing the latest code update which may not require to deploy.

The focus here is to keep code in a state of “deployable”. Continuous Delivery means you can release changes in code to any environment.

For CD to be successful, it is critical developing a repeatable system for moving code through the DevOps pipeline.

After passing all tests and evaluations, we can publish code notifications to production with the simple click of a button. Unfortunately, continuous delivery frequently necessitates the most investment and effort.

Benefits of Continuous Delivery (CD) –

• Improves performance and reduces downtime.
• CD allows organizations to discharge high-quality characteristics efficiently.
• It guarantees a shorter time-to-market.
• It eradicates the operating expenses of the deployment process.

6)   Continuous Monitoring

Continuous performance monitoring is a best practice in DevOps. You can evaluate the efficiency of the DevOps approach by monitoring the appropriate performance measures, including lead time, mean time to identify, and issue intensity.

Tracking these statistics is also critical because it enables you to identify and solve problems quickly. The company’s objectives and targets determine DevOps performance measures.

You must consider all the measures that add to your company’s profitability and success. By taking into account the metrics, you can create cost-optimized software from the beginning and make timely adjustments based on customer feedback.

7)   Infrastructure As Code

Covrize also uses IaC, which allows our teams to test applications in production-like environments early in the development process. The cloud dynamically provisions and tears down settings based on IaC definitions. The infrastructure code can be validated and tested to prevent common deployment issues.

“Infrastructure as Code” is a crucial DevOps practice because it allows teams to build and version infrastructure the same way they do source code.

Developers inside their current developer tools add infrastructure “code.”

Quick-Tip – The professionals at Covrize use Docker and Kubernetes to create and operate containers and containerized applications at scale.

This practice assists operations teams in tracking environment configurations, tracking changes, and simplifying configuration rollback. It also eliminates the need for a conventional server, operating system, storage, database server, and other infrastructure provisioning and management.

The DevOps process we adopt at Covrize for effective implementation!

Covrize uses an agile and automated workflow to achieve desired results and streamline your process. Each phase of our DevOps lifecycle is focused on closing the development-operations gap and driving output through ongoing development, incorporation, screening, evaluation and feedback, distribution, and implementation.

Advantages you can leverage from DevOps

In addition to speeding up teamwork, streamlining incident response, and improving communication, DevOps has had a positive impact on every enterprise.

1) Collaboration And Communication

The DevOps approach views the development process holistically by eliminating the barriers between development and operations. Each level of collaboration and communication is improved.

2) Better Releases & Smarter Work

Automating and introducing new processes can increase the team’s productivity and allow them to release more frequently with fewer bugs.

3) Improve The Management Of Unplanned Work

Every team faces the reality of unplanned work- a reality that is most often detrimental to team productivity. Establishing processes and clearly defining priorities will enable the development and operations teams to manage incidental work better while focusing on their planned activities.

4) An Innovative Approach

To unlock innovation in software development, DevOps is essential. A DevOps approach can assist you in delivering your software products on time.

5) Adaptability

Using DevOps allows for a more efficient change management process and ensures that the process does not slow down or interfere with the existing process. It also assists IT leaders in overcoming challenges associated with siloed teams executing different strategies independently.

6) Higher ROI For Businesses

A DevOps approach emphasizes continuous, regular, and automated software releases. If you can release software many times a day, pushing one release to production is not a difficult task.

Conventional releases require several people working together, cumbersome processes, operations teams working late nights and weekends to resolve issues, etc.

Don’t you think it will add value to the organization if you have a relaxed, happy, and contented Operations team to address issues proactively? The frequent failures of deployment would be a benefit rather than a stressor.

To wrap it up!

DevOps is much more than just a common trend. It is a method of thinking that can significantly affect how your company develops and releases software.

Keep this in mind – you can’t generate effective results for your organization through DevOps until it’s appropriately deployed.

And for a successful implementation, you should work with an experienced DevOps implementation firm. If you’re looking for one, Covrize can assist you!

The DevOps specialists at Covrize keep themselves updated with best industry practices, evolving methods, world-class techniques, and step-by-step procedures to meet specific business requirements.

Contact us today to leverage our expert DevOps services. Our experts will assist you in developing a blueprint for incorporating DevOps to meet your business needs completely.