Now-a-days, DevOps is very popular buzzword in the IT industry and is gaining good traction by companies to adopt DevOps culture and practices to improve software delivery and reliability.
What is DevOps?
Whether you’re developing a desktop application or a web/mobile based application, or an enterprise application, you always want to make sure that your systems and software are developed using the best delivery processes and practices.
Processes and practices help developers and operations team to improve collaboration and reliability of software. This can be achieved by automating the build and deployment processes.
Thus, DevOps as the name suggests, is the collaboration between the development and operations team to improve software reliability through automation of best practices of software development. It integrates development and operations part of the teams to make possible the ‘end-to-end agility’.
More Details:
Organizations of all sizes are under pressure to deliver better software faster and more efficiently.
DevOps is a model to optimize processes for quicker deliveries. It helps to fill the gap between the developers, operations and important stakeholders involved in the application.
It consists of small size teams of development and operations field that collaborate among themselves and with the stakeholders to ensure reliable delivery and maximum payback. Thus, DevOps has changed the mindset of people.
DevOps is an end-to-end activity. It consists of delivering software to users, i.e. ability to deploy, maintain and scale an application. By using such features right from the product’s inception, DevOps teams are able to deliver applications that are far more fit-for-purpose, easy-to-maintain and stable after deployment to the production environment.
DevOps intend to be “product-centric” and look beyond the “project model” of IT. Teams should be completely responsible for everything which is related to their software product right from inception to the retirement. This prevents individuals from just doing one part of their work without considering its impact on the software delivery chain.
DevOps has also helped to improve staff morale and motivation. By taking this approach to the software delivery process, the resulting ease and reliability inspires the confidence to make frequent releases. This facilitates ongoing feedback to be quickly incorporated into future releases and software delivery to be truly agile.
Key Benefits of DevOps:
- Helps in continuous delivery of software without any blockers
- Software Release Process becomes smooth
- Helps to get rid of uncertainty
- No Production environment related issues occur at the time of build process
- All processes and practices in DevOps helps in quick resolution to problems
- Quick delivery of features
- It provides a stable operating environment
- Reduces complexity to manage things
- We can spend more time to innovate
- Brings operations team under the gamut of agility
- Provides early and continuous delivery of business value to customers which indirectly increases customer satisfaction with the created software
- Important post production aspects of product health monitoring and structured feedback from stakeholders to improve product features are given their due importance
Lot of IT companies are adopting DevOps practices but unless and until we foster DevOps culture it would be difficult to sustain. In my next blog you will understand how to foster DevOps culture and tools guidance to implement processes.
