What is DevOps?
DevOps is a combination of software development (dev) and operations (ops). It is defined as a software engineering methodology which aims to integrate the work of development teams and operations teams by facilitating a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility.
DevOps represents a change in mindset for IT culture. In building on top of Agile, lean practices, and systems theory, DevOps focuses on incremental development and rapid delivery of software. Success relies on the ability to create a culture of accountability, improved collaboration, empathy, and joint responsibility for business outcomes.
DevOps describes a culture and set of processes that bring development and operations teams together to complete software development. It allows organizations to create and improve products at a faster pace than they can with traditional software development approaches.
What is Automation?
Automation is a crucial need for DevOps practices, and automate everything is the fundamental principle of DevOps. Automation kick starts from the code generation on the developers machine, until the code is pushed to the code and after that to monitor the application and system in the production.
Automating infrastructure set up and configurations, and software deployment is the key highlight of DevOps practice. DevOps practice id is dependent on automation to make deliveries over a few hours and make frequent deliveries across platforms.
Automation in DevOps boosts speed, consistency, higher accuracy, reliability, and increases the number of deliveries. Automation in DevOps encapsulates everything right from the building, deploying, and monitoring.
What is Scaling?
Scaling is the ability of the systems to continue to function properly when changed in size and volume. One can opt for Upscaling or downscaling depending on the resource usage. Scalability helps in utilizing the resources efficiently which in turn reduces per-user cost.
What is Infrastructure?
IT Infrastructure also called Technology Infrastructure enables an organization to build and run applications. Traditional infrastructure includes hardware, data centers and servers that are manually configured and maintained. Cloud Infrastructure provides IT resources over the internet. There are many cloud service providers providing the innovations and advancements such as GCP, AWS, and Microsoft Azure.
IaC(Infrastructure as Code) and IaaS(Infrastructure as a Service) are choices when it comes to selecting a model for managing and deploying IT infrastructure.
IaC is a form of infrastructure management that commits an organization's infrastructure elements into text files within a version control system.
IaaS is a cloud-based infrastructure system, with servers, storage, compute and network systems all provided virtually over the internet.
DevOps Lifecycle
DevOps lifecycle includes Continuous Development, Continuous Testing, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment and Continuous Monitoring.
Continuous Development: This phase involves the Planning and Coding of the software. No tools are required for planning, whereas there are several tools for maintaining the code such as Git, SVN etc. For packaging the code into executable file tools like Ant, Maven and Gradle are used.
Continuous Testing: The previously developed software is continuously tested for bugs. Automation testing tools like Selenium and TestNG are used for this phase of the lifecycle.
Continuous Integration: The most important phase of the lifecycle, where every new commit/change to the code is continuously integrated with existing code with the help of tools like Jenkins, Circle CI etc.
Continuous Deployment: The code is deployed to the production servers in this phase. Configuration Management(tools like Puppet, and Ansible) and Containerisation tools(tools like Docker and Vagrant) help in achieving CD.
Continuous Monitoring: In this phase, continuous monitoring of the performance of the application happens. If any errors are there with performance, the root cause is determined and helps in fixing the issue as soon as possible with the help of tools like Splunk, Nagios etc.
Why is DevOps important?
The usage of DevOps improves the SDLC to fasten the delivery to the customer. It increases efficiency and the team can be encouraged to innovate. Automation increases efficiency where previously the tasks that were time-consuming and repetitive, are now to be used with other important tasks that require attention.