Today every company that deals with software development is seeking ways how to optimize this process as it is pretty costly while delivering the product more robust than competitors. Here DevOps practices can help.
Whilst the Waterfall development model prevailed, development and operations were separated from the software development lifecycle. Today, with agile methodologies with increased iteration and deployments rounds, a new approach of DevOps became necessary.
According to a study of more than 25,000 tech professionals from Puppet Research and Assessment, high-performing organizations deploy 200 times more frequently and effectively when they use DevOps, with 2,555 times faster lead times. While DevOps and change management aren’t always going to be easy, with the right setup of this process, you will increase your IT performance while reducing IT costs that turn in great business results.
How to do DevOps Effectively
The main principles of DevOps are automation, continuous delivery, and fast reaction to feedback under the concept of “CAMS”:
- Culture Represented by Human Communication, Technical Processes, and Tools
- Automation of Processes
- Measurement of KPIs
- Sharing of Feedback and Best Practices
DevOps Lifecycle Steps
DevOps deployment process is about continuous delivery. It’s an approach that merges testing, development, and deployment operations into a streamlined process. So what are the process stages that you need to set up, and what tools do you need to use, to integrate it into your business process effectively.
Agile Planning
Agile planning organizes work into short iterations called sprints, which can increase the number of releases. Applying with DevOps, Agile has a higher performance and reaps significant dividends for the companies that invest in it.
Integrating Infrastructure Automation with CI/CD tools
DevOps assumes that software is put into containers and the containerized application needs to be managed. At this stage, the tools being used will be Kubernetes, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet. They are integrated with CI/CD tools like Jenkins, Bamboo, or GoCD. This allows for more efficient configuration management and software deployment. Continuous integration development, once achieved, is part of what makes DevOps run so smoothly.
Continuous Automated Testing and Integration Aligning QA with Development
To achieve faster delivery with DevOps, sufficient automated testing must take place. While the quality assurance team sets the committed code, if bugs and vulnerabilities are revealed, they are sent back to the engineering team. This stage involves version control to detect integration problems in advance. The tools used will probably be Selenium, Ranorex, UFT, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Bamboo, and TeamCity.
Containerizing
Containerizing means using tools such as Docker to compartmentalize any problems that are taking place during software development. For example, you would do containerizing when the software under development travels from the testing environment to production.
The isolation of the containerized parts of the software from the overall IT infrastructure allows them to run with stability. Hence, DevOps infrastructure management is part of what containerization is all about.
Continuous Deployment
At this stage, the code is deployed to run in production on a public server. It must be implemented in a way that doesn’t affect already functioning features and can be available for many users.
Frequent deployment allows for a “fail fast” approach, meaning that the new features are tested and verified early. The tools used here would be Chef, Puppet, Azure Resource Manager, and Google Cloud Deployment Manager.
Continuous Monitoring
With monitoring tools, DevOps becomes much easier. The goal of monitoring is to detect the problematic areas of a process. The other aspect of it is to analyze the feedback from the team and users to report inaccuracies and improve the product’s function.
Also, the DevSecOps approach involves security monitoring and integrating security measures at each step of the development process. A vital part of these processes is automation tools that facilitate the workflow. These might be Zabbix, Nagios, or Prometheus.
Organize an Initiative and Integrate Stakeholders
If you can bring interested parties on board to back your DevOps aspirations, then you will have more capital to use for the venture. A program manager should utilize best practices to improve interdepartmental collaboration, infrastructure provisioning, software development and testing.
Ensure Continuous Feedback Between Your Teams
To spot gaps, issues, and inefficiencies, you will need feedback loops to automate communication between tests. This allows everyone on the team to put in their feedback, and the product will be better for it.
You should also make sure that the whole company is on the same page with your DevOps goals and objectives.
Following these steps and tips, you can make the integration process of DevOps smooth and manage this approach effectively. Though it requires efforts and resources to put in place, a DevOps approach is worth these investments and returns a high ROI for your business in the short-term.