DevOps

DevOps(Development Operations), an extension of agile methodology, bridges the Development team and the Operations team in an IT organization, to ensure that the software is operable and maintainable in the production environment as and when it needs to be released. ‘Dev’ stands for Developers and ‘Ops’ covers the whole operations team including systems engineers, system administrators, release engineers, DBAs, network professionals, security engineers, and various other sub disciplines and job titles.

In DevOps practice, the development and operations team participates in a continuous and collaborative way rather than periodically, from the design phase till the support phase. DevOps practice automates many repeatable tasks to increase efficiency and thereby reducing the possibility of manual errors throughout the development lifecycle. In short, DevOps enables Development and Operations teams to work together in utilizing the right set of DevOps tools to enable a continuous delivery of IT services. However, DevOps isn’t just about using the right kind of DevOps tools but also about creating a collaborative work culture.

Why DevOps?

With changing technologies and market trends, customers are demanding for faster services/ solutions, increased functionalities along with the cost efficiency. These increasing customer demands put pressure on IT organizations to become more flexible and agile with faster turnaround of services in a cost efficient way. The concept of DevOps originated from this.

DevOps enables IT organizations to become more reliable and agile without overruling the standards and practices that are currently in place. Apart from increasing the IT efficiency, DevOps practice also aims at improving business efficiency, to meet the changing market demands. The key driving force of DevOps adoption is to increase business productivity, profitability, market share, competitive advantage and innovation. DevOps with the combination of people, processes, and tools along with methodologies enable technology to change at the speed of the business and improve overall quality, at the same time reduce risk and cost to a larger extend.

How DevOps is related to Agile Delivery?

DevOps is built on the concepts of agile methodology. It identifies the importance of extending agile principles beyond development by including operations and all other functions that support the application development life cycle to increase efficiency, consistency, quality and sustainability. DevOps emerged to streamline software development and facilitate IT operations and maintenance in a much improved way than the agile promises. To a certain extent, Agile is DevOps minus the IT operations. More than a convergence of Development + Operations, DevOps is getting involved in to all the phases of software development including governance, quality assurance (QA), testing, and security and release management. DevOps brings in automation, collaboration, cultural change and an organizational structure that is less complex and is easy to navigate. With people, process, and tools, along with technology dimensions it secures the collaboration and sync up the multiple departments in IT to move functionality to production faster and enable a faster delivery. When agile delivery and DevOps Solutions combines together in an IT organization it can lead to tangible business outcomes.

How to implement DevOps?

Implementing DevOps in an organizational level is not a simple task. It requires multiple buy- ins including leadership team effort, strategizing, discussion on ROI, evangelizing a new culture, identifying the people, implementing the right tools and more.

DevOps as an extension to agile, the mantra is ‘People over Process over Tools’. Hence it always start with choosing the right people (a pilot team who is willing to try new things and support change, willing to take risks), establishing the right process (standardize it throughout the engineering) and implementing the right tools which will eventually deliver the positive end results in business.