In the past twenty years, industries and consumers have been propelled into using software and technology on a daily, if not hourly basis. For anything from shopping to communication, to entertainment and banking. Therefore companies are having to develop software in a unified, automated, and responsive approach for optimum efficiency.
I started building my glossary of integration platform terms last year and came across DevOps. It is defined as a combination of cultural philosophies, practices and tools that increases an organisation’s ability to deliver products or services at a high velocity. From that brief description, I didn’t fully gauge that DevOps was a culture or way for development and operation teams to work within a business.
DevOps Explained
The term DevOps was first coined by Patrick Debois, a DevOps expert, in 2009. It is described as a development strategy that bridges a gap between software development and IT operations. Gartner has defined it as “focusing on rapid IT delivery through the adoption of agile, lean practices in the context of a system-orientated approach. It has an emphasis on people and culture and seeks to improve collaboration between operation and development teams. DevOps implementations utilise technology, especially automation tools that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic infrastructure from a life cycle perspective.”
It is designed as a collaborative process or culture between two teams. The process aims to use this mindset to reduce the software development life cycle. As a result, teams can deliver features, fixes and updates more frequently to their customers.
How does DevOps work?
It has been noted by several top thought leaders, in the DevOps, field that it emerged as an outgrowth and works in a similar way to Agile. The Agile Admin explains that “agile software development prescribes close collaboration of customers, product management, developers and sometimes QA to fill in the gaps and rapidly iterate towards a better product, service delivery and how the app and systems interact are a fundamental part of the value proposition to the client as well, and so the product team needs to include those concerns as a top-level item. From this perspective, DevOps is simply extending Agile principles beyond the boundaries of the code to the entire delivered service.”
Common capabilities of DevOps cultures include collaboration, automation, continuous integration, and continuous delivery.
Collaboration is a vital element of DevOps culture and filters throughout the other capabilities. Through collaboration, there is an increase in communication between teams, which enables development operations to be seamless, rapid, and effective. This can not only be vital to development and operation teams but can be applied across an entire organization.
Automation is an important means of accomplishing work efficiently between teams. Where there is automation there have to be tools, whether they are made in-house or bought. As a result, these are heavily relied upon to automate large parts of the development operations and deployment process. When automation is adopted it can lay the foundation for scaling and standardising automation across an entire organisation.
Continuous Integration & DevOps
Continuous integration refers to the merging of source code updates from all developers on a team. The continued merging prevents a developer’s local copy of code for a project from drifting too far afield as new code is added by others. Thus avoiding merging conflicts. Developers will merge code updates on a regular, if not daily basis. They communicate frequently to help minimise any errors or conflicts.
Continuous delivery has been well defined by Amazon Web Services as “a software development practice where code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a release to production.” This process relies heavily upon automation, so it can deliver updates into a production environment faultlessly and continuously.
With all these elements working in unison, it results in high-speed and quality product releases. As well as, faster responsiveness to customer needs, and ultimately a better working environment. DevOps as a culture can, if working correctly, be applied to an entire organisation to help achieve the overall business objectives.
DevOps for Startups
The DevOps methodology can play an important role if implemented early with a startup. This is because it will give them agility and flexibility if introduced early. As well as influence how the business grows and develops, putting in place future processes and automation. DevOps gives sustainable power for the company in the market, and the ability to compete strongly with competitors.
For instance, ‘SaaSy’ is our example SaaS startup that has launched its product to the market. Early signs show that sales are going well and that they are making a small profit with the user base increasing, the product is in need of upgrading. The founder isn’t interested in further developing the product to satisfy customer needs and the customers are slowly finding more issues resulting in a loss of use, trust and ultimately churn.
If DevOps had been implemented the product would have been continually developed, integrated and delivered to customers.
Why implement a DevOps automation culture into your business?
DevOps has numerous benefits to not only development and operations teams, but potentially an entire business. While automation makes it easier to achieve DevOps business goals.
DevOps and automation can provide consistency across repetitive tasks by configuring an automation tool and removing the threat of human error. As well as increase the speed of the team from code integration to application deployment. It also creates a much more reliable and stable system due to improved collaboration. Therefore this sees a reduction in errors from miscommunication.
Automating processes are scalable when managing multiple applications, and/or environments, all while remaining consistent. As a result, teams have a better understanding of the product due to having access to data about product performance from end-users. Thus being able to develop a strategy to solve any pain points or errors occurring.
DevOps Culture and the Future
It is believed that DevOps will evolve further in the coming years. It has been predicted that security will be baked in early, with many businesses adopting DevSecOps. Which focuses on the integration of a security component into the DevOps process. This has seen an increase in focus due to the rapid increase in remote working, which heightened security threats businesses face.
Another prediction is that business people will become part of the team, seeing greater collaboration to help businesses adapt to digitalisation. With the use of citizen developers working directly with low code automation tools, they can build whole interfaces, and resolve integration issues all within the same platform.
Automated processes will invade the DevOps ecosystem even more with autonomous DevOps automation. It is a robotic process automation tool that helps with the automation of manual and error-prone tasks for greater even productivity. As a result and teamed with AIOps, which provides seamless operational feedback, and automated bug fixes will remove most human involvement.
Finally, there will also be an increased use and advancement in Infrastructure Automation (IA) tools. These IaaS or iPaaS environments provide a secure infrastructure where teams can plan and execute self-service integrations and automation.
Cyclr as an automation tool, how can it help your DevOps?
Cyclr is an embedded integration platform as a service. The platform has a library of API connectors that can be used to create integrated automation. It can be used as an online solution to take the weight off a DevOps engineer’s shoulders. With low-code integration tools, anyone in a DevOps team can handle automation and integrations.
Using Cyclr means you can reduce the hours spent on repetitive tasks, lighten the software teams’ load, and remove developer backlog. As a result, you can serve your customer’s needs, and focus on your main product and improve your infrastructure. Cyclr has been designed for implementation via private cloud infrastructure and you’ll not even notice it there.
The software has become an integral part of any business. Its usage is only ever going to increase with digitisation being adopted by businesses around the world. DevOps has established a culture of open communication and enhanced collaboration. Resulting in the ability to better respond to customer needs, increase confidence in the applications that they build and achieve business goals faster.
Learn more about Cyclr
FAQ
What is a DevOps engineer?
A DevOps engineer is an IT professional who works with software developers, system operators and admins, IT operations staff and others. They oversee and facilitate code releases or deployments on continuous integration and continuous delivery. Gartner describes a DevOps engineer as someone who “identifies and optimizes the interdependencies between applications development and infrastructure operations through a collaborative approach to continuous delivery.”
On a day-to-day basis, a DevOps engineer’s responsibilities include project management, designing and improving IT infrastructure, performing testing and benchmarking, automation, optimising release cycles, monitoring and reporting, and security.
What is a DevOps toolchain?
A DevOps toolchain is the tools and technology that enable previously siloed development and operation teams to collaborate across the product lifecycle. As a result, these tools help tackle DevOps capabilities such as collaboration, continuous integration, automation, and continuous delivery.
What are some examples of DevOps tools?
– Jira Software
– DataDog
– Kubernetes
– Docker
– Ansible
– Chef
– Puppet
– Terraform
– Bitbucket
– GitHub
