DevOps and its Impact on Information Technology (IT)

DevOps refers to an enterprise software development method and a collaborative way of developing and deploying software. The word ‘DevOps’ (Development and Operations) was coined by Patrick Debois, best known as “the father of DevOps” in the year 2009. DevOps is an operational philosophy that promotes better communication between Development and Operations, cross-practicality and better working relationship. DevOps helps to establish collaborative cross-functional teams that share responsibility for maintaining the system that runs the software and prepares the software to run on that system with increased quality feedback and automation issues.

Benefits of DevOps

DevOps is considered to be a set of business-driven practices that provides rapid and reliable software delivery, providing business value to customers in an efficient manner. It is used to improve collaboration between all stakeholders from the planning stage through delivery and automation of the delivery process.

Some of the benefits of adopting DevOps are as follows:

• Improves deployment frequency.
• Achieves faster time to market.
• Shortens lead time between fixes.
• Improves mean time to recovery.
• Lowers the failure rate of new releases.

Typical Architecture — How it transforms IT?

Why do Enterprises need DevOps?

There needs to be better communication and collaboration to serve the IT business needs of the organization between the software development team and those working in IT operations. The DevOps culture emphasizes and focuses on creating a fast and stable work flow throughout development and IT operations. The primary role of DevOps is to deploy features into production quickly while detecting and correcting problems whenever they occur, without letting other services getting disrupted.

Guiding Principles

The guiding principles of DevOps consist of CAMS — Culture, Automation, Measurement and Sharing. Culture is pervasive and drives the behavior of the employees of an organization while Automation is considered to deliver measurable business value to the organization. Measurement is a driving force as measuring “DevOps success” is a critical factor and Sharing helps you to know how knowledge is captured and disseminated.

Some of the significant reasons for enterprises to adopt DevOps are:

• DevOps organizations can deliver with maximum speed, functionality, and innovation.
• Includes technical benefits like continuous software delivery.
• Less complexity to manage and faster resolution of problems.
• Cultural benefits include happier and more productive teams, higher employee engagement and greater professional development opportunities.
• Faster delivery of features.
• More stable operating environments.
• Improved communication and collaboration.
• More time to innovate (rather than fix/maintain).
• Continuous delivery, less complex problems to fix, fewer failures.
• Faster resolution of problems and more time to focus on high-value features.
• Increased customer satisfaction and reduced cloud/server infrastructure costs.
• Faster delivery of software features, increase in sales and more stable operating environments.

Who’s doing DevOps?

Companies from traditional retailers to big software companies are now using DevOps in order to bring improvements in their cloud and server infrastructure. They have become aware of the significance of DevOps for facilitating product management and development cycles and enhancing security and application reliability. Before the DevOps movement took place, teams within IT like Operations, Development and QA were somewhat siloed but now, DevOps bridges the gap between development and operations teams and addresses the challenges of today’s timeline for application development.

Tools used in DevOps

These are some of the key tools and practices that are used in various projects.

• Jenkins — As a tool, Jenkins is a good choice for DevOps engineers to monitor the executions of repeated jobs. The key features are Permanent links, RSS/e-mail/IM integration, After-the-fact tagging, JUnit/TestNG test reporting and Distributed builds.
• New Relic — This delivers application performance monitoring (APM) as a purely SaaS product. It embraces the power and accessibility of the Cloud and has grown rapidly. New Relic has become an integral tool for developers, IT ops teams, and executives around the world.
• Nagios — It is an open-source computer-software application which monitors systems, networks and infrastructure. Nagios offers monitoring services for servers, switches, applications and services. It alerts users when things go wrong and informs them when the problem has been resolved.
• VSTS — Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) or Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs for Microsoft Windows, as well as web sites, web applications and web services.
• Docker Hub — It is a cloud-based registry service for building and shipping application or service containers. Docker Hub provides a centralized resource for container image discovery, distribution and change management, user and team collaboration, and workflow automation throughout the development pipeline.

The Future of DevOps

DevOps is here to stay as it will continue to break down silos and increase collaboration. It has become significant and critical in this competitive age because of the improvement in product quality, speedier resolution to problems, risk mitigation and quick releases and tests of features. Organizations and enterprises value transparency and collaboration hence, they will continue to produce the best products and lead their industries. DevOps increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity while evolving and improving products at a faster pace.

Given the pace at which technology is changing, organizations are embracing DevOps as it focuses on people and process for aligning IT and business, enabling digital transformation and breaking down the silos and improved customer experience and satisfaction. DevOps will remain relevant for the current generation of software developers and the next generations.

By,

Nairita Goswami (Marcom Specialist), RapidValue &

Shahjahan Thapadar (Sr. Software Architect and DevOps Expert), RapidValue