It takes a lot of time and energy to develop software. Planning, designing, implementing, deploying, and monitoring are just a few of the several phases that go into the development process, which is labor-intensive and includes various components. The shortcomings of the traditional approaches gave rise to the Agile methodology. To meet the constant demands of technological advancement something was needed to support the new way of developing software. In this blog post Datalounges discusses how DevOps can support the Agile development methodologies.
Development and Operations (DevOps) is a word that is now widely used in the IT industry (Braunton 2018, 11). DevOps facilitates communication between developers and operations teams so they can function as one cohesive unit (Lwakatare et al. 2015; Humble & Molesky 2011, 6). Increasing efficiency, innovation, speed, reduction of errors, and value delivery to customers and businesses are the goals of DevOps (Adams 2021, 9; Seremet & Rakic 2021, 225; Miller et al. 2022, 25). An organization segmented workplace culture and ineffective interdepartmental coordination are to be changed using DevOps (Freeman 2019, 8; Miller et al. 2022, 25).
The DevOps mindset integrates operations, software development, system management, and quality monitoring to enable quicker and more frequent execution of changes in production at several levels, which might be cultural, practical, and tooling-related (Adams 2021, 7). Not only is DevOps a new way of working, but it’s also a new way of thinking (Miller et al. 2022, 26).
Software development and IT operations can be automated and integrated using the DevOps conceptual framework and practice (Ogala 2022, 1). Improved scalability and monitoring of frequent end-to-end deployments using continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are made possible by DevOps. (Myrbakken & Colomo-Palacios 2017; Hamilton 2022a; Simic 2020; Krief 2019)
DevOps emphasizes teamwork, empowerment, and giving people priority over processes and tools. It is a combination of people, procedures, and products that values user needs. Value is the fundamental concept. Developers, testers, operation personnel, security experts, and infrastructure engineers are all part of the DevOps approach to the development process (Krief 2019; Freeman 2019, 7-8; Five Best Practices…2020). DevOps seeks to establish cross-functional, collaborative teams to take charge of the entire product lifecycle. The building blocks for teamwork are architecture, design, and development. (Adams 2021, 13; Braunton 2018, 11; Hall n.d.)
The DevOps application is a powerful technique for encouraging agile communication between the development team and IT operations, coordinating business activities with IT to support results like profitability (Pestchanker 2018; Chowdhury 2019). DevOps aims to build, test, and distribute software products in a timely and reliable manner. DevOps emphasizes the connection and loop between the stages of the development lifecycle seen in Figure 3. (Ogala 2022, 1)
Figure 3. DevOps methodology. Source: Simic 2020.
DevOps values a culture that encourages constant improvement, changes, and adaptation (Soni 2019; Adams 2021, 13). DevOps culture focuses on people, procedures, and technologies to automate the application lifecycle while creating high-quality software to obtain competitive advantages (Soni 2019). Behavior, liability, trust, and ongoing productivity are all part of the DevOps culture shown in Figure 4 (Freeman 2019, 7-8; Adams 2021, 7). The DevOps culture places focus on client input and value and stakeholder interests (Adams 2021, 16-20).
Figure 4. DevOps culture elements. Source: Krief 2019, 11.
DevOps techniques are linked to software, applications, and products and adhere to best practices to obtain better quality with effective communication and end-to-end responsibility (Soni 2019; Simic 2020; Ismail 2018). In contrast to conventional software development, DevOps involves continuously creating, testing, deploying, and maintaining software (Simic 2020). DevOps is focused on releasing code to manufacturing daily or every few hours and does not favor commonly used structures (Hamilton 2022a).
Technology best practices
A good DevOps best practice improves team dynamics, office atmosphere, and processes (Dhaduk 2022). Monitoring, infrastructure and deployment automation, performance management, and configuration management are all parts of the DevOps lifecycle (Dhaduk 2022; Ogala 2022, 1). To manage the complex web of dependencies found in modern apps, DevOps teams today use an application-centric approach rather than an infrastructure-centric one in the past (Five Best Practices…2020).
In DevOps, developers must adhere to and maintain quality standards using the best coding and architectural practices (Hamilton 2022a; Simic 2020). DevOps encourages frequent code revisions, which makes finding bugs in code straightforward (Chowdhury 2019). Developers and IT managers can quickly find and fix bugs with proper code version control. The DevOps teams can work together smoothly to correct errors if a failure occurs. (Chowdhury 2019; Ogala 2022, 5; Simic 2020) Version control makes it simpler to combine changes in the code within the files and store the codes in a single repository for recovery (Dhaduk 2022). To ensure that operator or organization notifications are received, automated control systems utilize DevOps (Ogala 2022, 2).
Developers may test and fix problems throughout the process with DevOps, not only in the final stage (Chowdhury 2019; Simic 2020). Manual testing, however, is extremely slow and prone to implementation problems (Krief 2019, 442). Automated testing is compulsory for a good DevOps framework. Automated testing provides meaningful feedback and determines the risk of the procedure. (Simic 2020; Chowdhury 2019)
A key component of DevOps best practices is continuous deployment. Instead of deploying the code together, continuous deployment deploys it in versions. (Chowdhury 2019; Best Practices…2019) Continuous deployment entails the automated release of updates that pose no damage to the current architecture with minimal human involvement (Simic 2020; Chowdhury 2019; Rafi et al. 2022, 2).
According to Dhaduk (2022), best practices also permit the adoption of microservices architecture, which divides complex programs into independent parts. Each component runs independently of the application, offers services, and uses application programming interfaces (APIs) for communication. (Dhaduk 2022)
Constant performance monitoring allows for application performance optimization seen in Figure 5 (Chowdhury 2019). Due to frequent and minor software releases, DevOps teams must continuously check performance (Simic 2020).
Figure 5. DevOps lifecycle by Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. Source: Ogala 2022, 4.
Before an application goes into production, developers and operations teams can use log and event management to track its activity. This process is a component of the overall pipeline delivery process. (Ogala 2022, 2) The goal is to prevent interruptions during the release procedure (Simic 2020).
Tooling to support developments
Developers can automatically merge unified code into a centralized repository as part of the CI process. Autonomous tools examine the accuracy of the code and make the necessary corrections illustrated in Figure 6. The end-users receive speedy, reliable delivery of the written code through CI. (Dhaduk 2022; Krief 2019, 13, 164)
Figure 6. The pipeline of Continuous Integration. Source: Krief 2019, 14.
Upon completion of CI, the automatic deployment of the application occurs in a non-production environment. The CD process starts when CI creates a package for an application. The purpose of the CD is to test the complete application, including all its dependencies. CI and CD are commonly used interchangeably in integration settings shown in Figure 7. (Krief 2019, 15)
Figure 7. The pipeline of Continuous Delivery. Source: Krief 2019, 16.
The CI tool builds a pipeline for the development, staging, and production phases (Simic 2020). The CI tool runs tests against the scripts and applications after incorporating and reducing occurs (Dhaduk 2022; Chowdhury 2019).
The code is added to a shared repository multiple times every day. Each developer divides the job into smaller, compact portions of code and searches for any errors. (Simic 2020) The developer pushes the updated code to the staging environment for testing before proceeding to production (Braunton 2018, 12).
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