09 April 2019
DevOps is the latest buzzword in the IT industry and almost every organisation in the world is planning to implement it, if they haven’t already. The reason for that is very obvious. In the last decade, DevOps has helped companies deliver proven results that cannot be ignored anymore.
With collaboration, communication, and integration as the three main principles, DevOps can help companies develop products at a faster rate, better serve their customers, and compete in the market more effectively.
However, since DevOps is still a relatively new concept, it is often confused or misunderstood by many. In this article, we will be discussing the DevOps principles, its many benefits and why it matters to IT companies.
DevOps is not a technology, it’s a programming methodology like waterfall or agile and it involves operations team and developers working together to achieve the same shared goal–to deliver bug-free applications in record time.
The idea is to encourage operations engineers and developers to work together throughout the product lifecycle and take advantage of each other’s skills, instead of working independently, to develop a coherent software and decrease the overall development time.
DevOps, like agile methodology, is based on idea that coding is just not enough. Any software you create is only considered complete after it has been thoroughly tested and successfully deployed in production. With DevOps, you can not only deliver software more quickly, but there will also be lesser number of iterable changes required.
In some cases, security and quality assurance teams are also integrated with the development and operations team throughout the software lifecycle.
Though, in all of these cases, testing is a part of the development cycle and it is not conducted after the entire development is done. Continuous testing and monitoring is carried out throughout the development stage to ensure that the code is correct. This approach leads to lesser number of iterations and errors when the entire software is developed.
There are many benefits to DevOps, including:
When developers and operations engineer work together, they are able to better understand each others’ concerns and incorporate them in their coding approach, which in turn leads to better and more effective software builds.
Since testing becomes an integral part of the development process in DevOps, you are not just able to test every part of the code but also review numerous failure scenarios which can help in addressing issues even before they arise.
The software teams are usually divided into several parts including operations, development, and QA. But the customers only really care about the final finished software that all the teams deliver together.
Implementing DevOps means, your teams are focused on the overall production value of the software instead of just their part.
Considering all the benefits of DevOps, it’s clear that this development methodology isn’t just another technological fad. DevOps can transform the entire development process and deliver visible results, which means it is definitely here to stay.
