DevOps (development and operations) is a collection of tools and technologies combined to carry out the software development process effectively. It aims to bridge the gap between two of the most significant departments in any IT organization, the development department, and the operations department. This What is DevOps blog will help you get an overview of the numerous concepts that play a significant role in defining DevOps.
Table of Contents:
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What is meant by DevOps?
DevOps, a combination of development (Dev) and operations (Ops), is a collaborative approach within software development and IT operations with the goal of enhancing the speed, efficiency, and quality of delivering software.
It revolves around breaking down barriers between development, operations, and other teams in order to promote an environment of collaboration, automation, continuous integration and continuous delivery.
DevOps emerged in the early 2000s to fill the gap between software development and IT operations. The term gained importance in 2009, focusing on collaboration and automation. By 2011, the DevOps movement accelerated, integrating new technologies for improved collaboration and software quality throughout the development lifecycle.
Have a Better Understanding of Why DevOps Replaced the Agile Model with this comprehensive DevOps Vs Agile Guide.
Why is DevOps Needed?
DevOps emerges as a response to the evolving challenges faced in the software development and IT operations surroundings. Its necessity follows from several key factors:
- Accelerated Delivery: DevOps aims to speed up the software development lifecycle, enabling organizations to deliver features and updates more rapidly. This flexibility is crucial in meeting ever-evolving market demands.
- Improved Collaboration: Bridging the gap between development and operations teams, DevOps promotes effortless communication. This ensures that both teams work together, leading to faster issue resolution and more efficient problem-solving.
- Reduced Errors and Downtime: Automation in the DevOps pipeline minimizes manual errors and reduces downtime. Continuous integration and deployment catch issues early in the development process, preventing them from increasing critical problems during deployment.
- Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: The quick and reliable delivery of features and updates contributes to improved customer satisfaction. DevOps enables organizations to respond right away to user feedback and changing market conditions.
- Cost Efficiency: By automating repetitive tasks and simplifying procedures, DevOps helps optimize resource utilization, leading to cost savings. It ensures that valuable resources are focused on innovation rather than time-consuming manual tasks.
Go through our blog on the Advantages of DevOps to learn more in detail.
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DevOps LifeCycle
Next, in our learning on what is DevOps is, let us look into how seamless delivery of software takes place with the help of stages in DevOps.
Here are the eight stages of DevOps LifeCycle
- Plan: This stage involves outlining project goals, defining features, and setting up a roadmap for development and operations teams to follow.
- Develop: Here, developers write code according to the project requirements. Continuous collaboration between teams ensures the code aligns with the established goals.
- Integrate: The integration phase involves combining code changes from multiple developers into a shared repository, ensuring that the changes work well together. Here tools like git are put to use by many enterprises.
- Deploy: Deploying the code to production or staging environments occurs in this phase, aiming for automated and error-free deployments. Many cloud deployment models are considered in this stage.
- Operate: Once deployed, the software operates in the production environment, and DevOps teams monitor its performance, addressing issues promptly.
- Monitor: Continuous monitoring involves tracking the software’s performance, user experience, and system health using monitoring tools. This allows teams to make informed decisions and implement improvements.
- Feedback: Feedback loops gather insights from users, operations, and other stakeholders, enabling teams to refine future iterations and enhance the software continually.
The process of adding new features and fixing bugs continuously to improve the application, in the shortest time possible is called DevOps Lifecycle.
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Behind every successful stage, there are a lot of tools that help in the smooth working of DevOps. Here are a few important ones:
Git
Git is one of the most popular free, open-source version control systems designed to handle various DevOps projects of all sizes, hence, it is a widely used DevOps tool across the software industry. Git allows us to track the progress of the work. We can save all the versions of the source code, and if necessary, return to a previous version. Git plays a major role in the continuous development of the DevOps life cycle.
Look into the GIT Cheat Sheet by Intellipaat to know about GIT in short.
Docker
Another important tool is the docker. Docker makes distribution development possible through ‘containers’ and automates the deployment of the apps. To make the application portable and more secure, docker isolates the apps into separate containers. The docker apps are OS and platform-independent.
Look into the Docker Cheat Sheet by Intellipaat to learn about Docker in short.
Selenium
Selenium is a portable software testing framework for web applications. It is an open-source tool and runs on most platforms like JAVA, Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Javascript, etc. Selenium is used for continuous testing.
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Maven
From project structure to building steps, Maven is one of the top DevOps tools that provide us with guidelines that when followed help us get our job done faster with minimal configurations. It compiles the source code, runs tests, packages the results into JARs, WARs, etc., and uploads the packages into remote repos.
Jenkins
It is a continuous integration server that can be used for testing. As a developer, it helps in finding and killing the bugs in the code. Jenkins offers a huge plugin ecosystem of about 1000 plugins which means, it can integrate with almost all the DevOps tools.
Nagios
This is another tool with a rich plugin system, with free and open-source monitoring tools that help in finding and fixing the problems in the IT infrastructure before they affect sensitive business projects.
Ansible
Ansible is another open-source IT configuration management and deployment tool. It uses a simple syntax written in YAML. ansible does not require any additional ports to be installed on the host system on which the automation is to be done. This saves a lot of resources for the application. The modules work with JSON and are extensible with any programming language. Overall, this is a simple tool that provides large productivity gains.
Puppet
Puppet is a configuration management platform that allows us to manage the infrastructure as a code. The delivery of code is faster and more secure as it automates infrastructure management. Puppet also provides open-source tools for minor projects.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes, an important DevOps tool, simplifies container management. It streamlines the deployment, scaling, and coordination of containerized applications. This open-source platform optimizes DevOps practices, ensuring applications run smoothly and efficiently, regardless of scale or complexity.
Terraform is a crucial DevOps tool for managing infrastructure. It allows you to define and allocate assets as code, making the process efficient and consistent. With Terraform, you can easily create, modify, and version your infrastructure. This tool’s automation and flexibility are highly valued in DevOps, simplifying infrastructure management for better control and efficiency.
The various stages along with the tools help in achieving DevOps.
Also, have a look at our blog on top DevOps monitoring tools to learn more!
What is CI/CD in DevOps?
CI/CD stands for cContinuous iIntegration and cContinuous dDelivery (or cContinuous dDeployment) and forms an important component of DevOps practices.
- Continuous Integration (CI): CI is the practice of regularly merging code changes from different team members into a shared repository. It involves automated builds and tests, ensuring that each code change is checked and integrated into the main codebase as early as possible. This frequent integration minimizes conflicts, detects issues early, and maintains code stability.
- Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment (CD): CD is about automating the release process. Continuous Delivery ensures that the code is always in a releasable state, allowing for frequent, reliable, and manual-triggered deployments. On the other hand, Continuous Deployment automates the entire deployment process, releasing changes to production automatically after passing.
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CI/CD Pipelines
A typical CI/CD pipeline consists of several stages, each performing a specific task in the software delivery cycle:
- Code Commit: Developers commit their code changes to a version control system like Git. This causes the start of the CI/CD pipeline.
- Code Build: The pipeline starts by building the code, compiling it if necessary, and creating executable files or artifacts.
- Automated Testing: Once the code is built, automated tests are executed. These tests include unit tests, integration tests, and other checks to ensure the code functions correctly and meets quality standards.
- Code Analysis: Static code analysis tools are often employed to scan the code for potential issues, and security vulnerabilities.
- Deployment Preparation (Continuous Delivery): In Continuous Delivery, the validated code is prepared and packaged for deployment. It’s made ready for release to different environments such as staging or pre-production.
- User Acceptance Testing (UAT): Some pipelines include a UAT stage where stakeholders or users test the application in a production-like environment to provide feedback.
- Deployment (Continuous Deployment): In Continuous Deployment, once the code passes all tests and UAT (if included), it’s automatically deployed to the production environment. This step ensures that successful changes are quickly and automatically released to users.
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Benefits of DevOps
Here are some benefits of DevOps:
- Faster Delivery of Product: DevOps encourages continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), leading to faster releases.
- Improved Collaboration: Collaboration between development and operations teams is improved, resulting in a culture of shared responsibility and communication.
- Increased Efficiency: Automation of repetitive tasks reduces manual errors and accelerates the overall development and deployment process.
- Better Quality: Continuous testing and monitoring help identify and address issues early in the development cycle, improving the overall quality of the software.
- Cost-Efficiency: Automation and streamlined processes reduce overall operational costs.
- Improved Customer Satisfaction: Faster delivery of features and more reliable software contribute to higher customer satisfaction.
There are number of benefits of the devops that is increasing its demand in market.
Challenges of DevOps
- Transformation: Adopting DevOps requires a cultural change, and getting teams to embrace new ways of working can be challenging.
- Complexity: Handling a complex and interconnected set of tools can be challenging and may require additional training for team members.
- Security Concerns: Rapid development and deployment may sometimes compromise security if not properly addressed within the DevOps processes.
- Continuous Learning: DevOps is an ever-evolving field, and teams need to continuously update their skills to keep up with new tools and practices.
- Tool Selection: Choosing the right set of tools for automation, testing, and deployment can be challenging.
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DevOps Engineers
A DevOps engineer is a skilled professional who combines expertise in software development and IT operations to improve software delivery processes. Their primary role revolves around encouraging collaboration between development and operations teams, aiming to automate and improve the software development lifecycle.
Responsibilities of DevOps Engineer
DevOps engineers focus on designing, implementing, and maintaining automation tools and infrastructure, enabling faster and more reliable software delivery. They supervise the integration of continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, automate testing processes, and manage infrastructure as code (IaC) using tools like Docker, Kubernetes, and Ansible.
Skills Required For DevOps Engineer
Proficiency in programming languages, understanding of version control systems like Git, knowledge of cloud platforms, and experience with automation and management tools are important for a DevOps engineer. Additionally, strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work collaboratively across teams are crucial.
Job Role and Salary
Exploring the job roles and corresponding salary ranges within the DevOps domain provides a comprehensive overview of the diverse career paths available in this field.
Job Title | Average Annual Salary |
DevOps Engineer | $133,574 |
Lead DevOps Engineer | $216,852 |
DevOps Architect
| $208,431 |
DevOps Consultant | $245,290 |
DevSecOps Engineer | $141,376
|
Cloud DevOps Engineer | $152,618 |
Infrastructure DevOps Engineer | $139,406 |
According to LinkedIn, there are about 4000+ jobs available for a DevOps engineer, just in India and this is increasing by the day. Most MNCs give top priority to people with industry-level DevOps engineering skills.
DevOps engineers are the highest-paid practitioners in the IT industry. An experienced DevOps Engineer
Some of the new job roles emerging for DevOps are
- DevOps Architect
- DevOps Developer
- DevOps Consultant
- DevOps Test Analyst
- DevOps Manager
Preparing for an Interview? Go through these DevOps Interview Questions.
Future of DevOps
The future of DevOps looks promising, ready for significant advancements shaping the field of software development and operations. Expectations include integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to enhance automation, encouraging predictive analysis and smarter decision-making.
DevSecOps, focusing on effortlessly integrating security throughout the development lifecycle, will gain prominence, while cloud-native technologies, such as containerization and serverless computing, will optimize cloud-based development.
Conclusion
In conclusion, DevOps is more than just a buzzword in the world of technology. It represents a fundamental shift in how we develop, deploy, and manage software and IT infrastructure. By encouraging collaboration, automation, and a continuous improvement mindset, DevOps enables organizations to deliver high-quality applications faster and with greater efficiency.
Accepting DevOps principles not only simplifies processes but also enhances communication and teamwork across development and operations teams. This not only leads to quicker software releases but also greater stability and reliability in the long run.
In an ever-evolving tech surroundings, DevOps is the bridge that connects development and IT operations, helping businesses stay flexible and competitive. Whether you’re a software developer, system administrator, or IT manager, understanding and adopting DevOps practices can lead to more effective and efficient operations.
Also, have a look at our blog on top DevOps monitoring tools to learn more!
DevOps encompasses culture and collaboration. True or False
True. DevOps encompasses both culture and collaboration. DevOps is not just about tools and automation but also about fostering a cultural shift within an organization. It promotes close collaboration and communication between development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams, breaking down silos and encouraging a shared responsibility for the entire software delivery process.
Who is a DevOps engineer?
A DevOps engineer is an IT professional with expertise in development and operations, including coding, infrastructure management, system administration, and DevOps toolchains. They also require strong interpersonal skills as they bridge organizational divides to foster collaboration.
Is DevOps an extension of Agile?
DevOps is not an extension of Agile but complements Agile methodologies. While Agile focuses on software development processes and iterative development, DevOps is more about the collaboration between development and operations, including automation and continuous delivery.
What is Docker in DevOps?
Docker is one of the latest innovations in DevOps. It has transformed the way applications are developed and deployed. Docker simplifies the process for developers and system administrators, utilizing OS-level virtualization to package and deliver software in containers, making deployment more straightforward.
What is the principle behind DevOps?
Automation is a fundamental principle in DevOps to streamline and accelerate software delivery. It involves using technology and tools to reduce manual and repetitive software development and deployment tasks. It helps in achieving efficiency, consistency, and speed while minimizing errors.
What are CI and CD in DevOps?
In DevOps, CI stands for continuous integration, where code changes are regularly integrated and tested. CD is continuous delivery, ensuring code is always deployable (CD) or automatically deployed to production (continuous deployment). These practices improve development speed and reliability.