Your organization wants to use the DevOps delivery approach and you are in the middle of nowhere, as the term sounds completely alien to your world. So, before you may analyse how and where to use it, you must know what DevOps is and what it is not. Even before that, let’s get some background on how this concept evolved.
Background
Originally, Developer and Operations used to be considered as two separate roles. After a Developers team designs, plans and develops an application, it requires an infrastructure. When the Developers team approaches the Systems team, the Systems team claims that it’s too late now and the infrastructure would be delayed, since it was not involved from the beginning. The Developers team then approaches the Operations team for determining the capacity to support this application. The Operations team also mentions the same reason that since the team was not involved from the beginning, the process to determine the capacity would be delayed.
The organizations then realised that to overcome such problems, the roles of Developers and Operations should be merged. As a result, while the Developers team started including the Operations team early in their projects, the Operations team started providing them tools such as continuous delivery and integration. A line of common tools was found that gave birth to the DevOps culture.
Definition
To put it simply, DevOps is defined as a practice that combines the generally distinct functions of software development (Dev) with production and operations (Ops) into one continuous and integrated process. It is not a technology, a job role, or a process, as some popular beliefs advocate. It’s about leveraging processes, people, and technology for breaking the existing blocks between Dev and Ops, and motivating an innovative and collaborative culture across the end-to-end software development process. That’s the reason why the three main principles of this approach are communication, collaboration, and integration.
Reasons to Adopt
DevOps is the next generation of Agile, which allows Agile teams to perform speedy product launches in the market. So, if you are still wondering why you should DevOps, here are some reasons that may help you decide:
- Cost Effectiveness: What can be more luring than saving costs when developing a software, and DevOps offers that to an extent.
- Maintainability: DevOps provides easy recovery in case a new release crashes or the existing system gets disabled.
- Time Saving: As compared to the traditional delivery approach, DevOps can save up to 50% time to market through its streamlined tactic.
- Predictability: New releases have significantly low failure rates.
- Less Risks: Due to incorporation of certain security aspects, defects and hence risks are reduced.
- Greater Quality: The result of overall features of DevOps is enhanced quality.
- Resiliency: With DevOps, the software system’s operational state is more secure, stable, and auditable.
Irrespective of the above features, it is always recommended to look through and analyse when it is exactly needed before deploying and implementing the DevOps culture in the workplace.
Ready to learn more about Devops? You may sign up for one of our upcoming classroom training and certification exam for DevOps Foundation.
