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Rapid business growth and exponential business transformation of IT with rapidly changing consumer behaviour are responsible for significant changes in the IT sector globally. IT solutions which enhance organization capabilities and highly paced software development, speed delivery of applications and services and time sensitive marketing of products and services is the need of the hour for organizations to gain competitive advantage over others.
Today we look more in detail about DevOps Implementation, its phases, its benefits and how it is transforming the way of working.
Understanding DevOps
DevOps is part of agile methodology to develop and release applications faster and maintain uninterrupted operations at lower costs. DevOps creates a continuous Integration/ continuous delivery pipeline using automation tools and collaborative approach within development and operations teams. DevOps focuses on automated tests in CI/CD pipeline and focuses on four fundamental principles – collaboration, focus one and result, automation, and continuous improvement with continuous monitoring.
The 4 phases of DevOps Implementation
DevOps is a synthesis between development and operations two of the most significant IT verticals and it provides an entirely new approach to software development to enable faster, better, high quality and reliable delivery. It demands adjustment in already established procedures of software development in the organization and a major cultural shift.
Related: ITIL vs DevOps: Can Both Concepts Work Together?
DevOps Phase # 1 : Management of Source Code
The heaviest lifting happens during coding in software development. Developers are expected to work on new features, bug fixes and not on testing, deployment, or maintenance. However, developers still participate in the DevOps process by using source code versioning software e.g., GitHub.
Often more than one developer is working on building different sections of software and they need to commit changes to a single repository – a central place to store all source code. In order to have all team members access to that code, it is ideal to rollback to previous versions, working on projects concurrently and easy to experiment and branch if required. The cultural shift required here is all team members aware of the rules and follow an agreed workflow while using Git.
Some of key tasks in DevOps pipeline could be:
- Seamless integration of developers ongoing commitment
- Purge any out-of-cycle updates from code repository
- Compilation of all department code
- Automated scripts from integration testing and pre-built unit
DevOps Phase # 2 : Testing
Post code base merger for all developers it is time to build applications. Instead of developers sitting and doing the code compilation process in DevOps this task is handled by a dedicated server using an automation tool such as Maven. This is much simpler in case code fails and the developer gets a detailed report on where and what to fix in code. Post compilation of code it is put in the testing process. The QA process is still a mix of manual and automated testing however DevOps teams need to set up automatic tests for application and environment.
DevOps Phase # 3 : Hosting & Implementation
Post software passes all tests it can be deployed and executable code is loaded into the production environment. To have zero downtime in an environment for customers is not possible in traditional approach however, in DevOps hosting is as simple as uploading files to a cloud folder or an APK file into the store with some basic options.
DevOps Phase # 4 : Monitoring & Maintenance
DevOps job does not stop after software delivery on cloud but constant monitoring of application performance is also falls in the preview with loads of questions to answer such as:
- Number of users / transactions threshold before application goes down
- How often to run backup jobs on server
- Services required to spin up the support new feature DevOps working on
- All security updates installed on server and so on
In addition, automation tools need to start gathering software behaviour , register outages, slow downs and any other issues cropping in.
Quick Tip
Global DevOps market expected to grow USD 9.41 billion by 2023