An Overview of the Most Important Concepts and Ideas about DevOps that You Should Know
Overview of DevOps
DevOps stands for Development and operations. It emphasizes breaking the siloed structure that is typical of the traditional software development process and shortening the development life cycle of software products and services by integrating the functionalities of the development and operations team.
The main aim of the DevOps strategy is to enhance the speed, productivity, and efficiency of the software development life cycle thereby ensuring faster delivery of top-notch applications by getting all the cross-functional teams to be on the same page. DevOps, as opposed to the traditional software development methodologies, emphasizes identifying and acting on smaller failures and thus enabling easier rectification that ultimately leads to faster deployment of products.
Some of the Important Concepts Related to DevOps
1) Shift-Left Approach
A shift-left approach involves ensuring security right from the early stages of application development. Security is something that is of utmost priority in today’s application development process with data attacks and breaches becoming more and more common.
According to GitLab’s Fifth Annual Global DevSecOps Survey, in 2021 more than 70 percent of the respondents reported that their teams had shifted left and incorporated security considerations earlier into the development stage. The shift-left approach, by driving early attention to the software development life cycle minimizes the possibilities of bugs and errors and brings down the risks of implementation failure.
2) Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration is the practice of integrating the code into a shared repository. In this technique, all the source code updates are merged into one mainstream and the codes are integrated from the developers as soon as it is available. The ultimate aim of continuous integration is to create small pieces of code that can be validated and integrated into the centralized code repository. It is used to provide faster rectification of code issues and identify what portion of code is ready for production.
3) Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery is a foundation agile principle of DevOps that emphasizes on continuous delivery of value. Continuous delivery involves the mechanism that enables teams to get changes of all types like new features, bug fixes, and configuration changes into the production.
Continuous delivery is a practice where the code changes are automatically prepared for release into production after testing. It includes automatic building, testing, and deploying. Continuous delivery thus focuses on changing the source code for production release as soon as automated testing validates it.
4) Continuous Deployment
It involves the deployment of techniques like automation to enable an organization to easily deploy the software into the production stage. It involves releasing the code several times and emphasizes maintaining the consistency of the code across the different environments and platforms by automating the production deployment end to end. Usage of automation solutions enables teams to reduce the amount of time as well as deploy the product faster into the production and thus ensure the delivery of value.
5) Automation
Automation is the practice that involves the deployment of several technologies and thereby bringing down the need for teams to deal with all the mundane, manual, and other repetitive processes. Deployment of automation practices enables teams to accelerate the software development process. Automating the software development life cycle enables teams to develop error-free applications and codes and thus reduce the time taken for developing, testing, and deploying the code. Automation enables teams to eliminate the delays associated with manual processes and accelerate the delivery of products and applications subject to minimize downtime.
6) Acceptance Testing
In acceptance testing, the application is released to a selected class of end-users to test the functionality as well as the availability of features and identify any potential shortcomings in the product before releasing it to the end-user community as a whole.
Automated testing facilitates the automatic reviewing and validation of a software product or an application to make sure that it meets the quality standards. Acceptance testing enables teams to analyze how far an application is acceptable to a larger audience of customers.
7) Configuration Management
It is a management process that involves establishing the consistency of an application throughout its useful life. It involves managing and controlling the changes to software using version control.
Configuration management enables teams to build robust systems by the deployment of tools that can automatically manage and monitor updates as well as automate complex tasks and thereby enhance overall agility.
8) Estimate Crucial Metrics
Some of the crucial metrics related to the Software development life cycle are
1) Lead Time
Lead time is the time from the start of the development life cycle to the very point of deployment. Lead time can help DevOps teams to identify the possible reasons for the delays in the development process and monitoring it enables DevOps teams to measure the productivity of the development process.
2) Mean Time to Detection (MTTD)
It is the time taken between when a problem first pops up and the moment it is detected. It is important to identify the problem quickly and get it fixed as early as possible. Having an in-house robust monitoring mechanism can help teams to identify the issues and get them addressed as early as possible.
3) Mean Time to Recovery
It is identified with the amount of time that takes a team to recover from a failure. Lower the MTTR, lower the time lost due to service disruptions.
9) Continuous Monitoring
This process incorporates monitoring across each and every phase of the software development life cycle. In continuous monitoring, information regarding the software is recorded and further analyzed to identify the key problems. This process can alert teams regarding the health and performance of the applications and the infrastructure and empower them to take proactive actions that ensure faster rectification of identified issues. Continuous monitoring can help a team to ensure the security and uninterrupted availability of their applications.
Conclusion
DevOps is one of the uncompromising requirements in today’s world. DevOps is what helps teams to acquire the agility that empowers them to respond to the customer demands on the fly. But in order to ensure the success of the DevOps strategy, it is of utmost importance to understand some of the key concepts related to DevOps. Here we have seen some of the crucial concepts of DevOps strategy that are worth looking at if you are planning to jumpstart your journey to DevOps.
For organizations that are looking to transit to a DevOps culture, Activelobby provides DevOps consulting services. We implement some of the best DevOps practices that ensure the timely delivery of applications.
