Introduction to DevOps
If you don't crack the shell, you can't eat the nut! Before diving into DevOps, we need to know what it entails.
What is DevOps???
DevOps can be simply explained as an Intersection of Development and Operations, terminologies that madeup DevOps are developer and operations engineer.
A DEVeloper(Dev) is an individual that builds and create software and applications. He/She writes, updates, debugs and executes the source code of a software application.
An OPerationS(Ops) engineer works to improve and optimize the processes involved in industrial equipment, procedures and systems.
According to AWS
“DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.”
According to Atlassian
‘‘DevOps is a set of practices, tools, and a cultural philosophy that automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams. It emphasizes team empowerment, cross-team communication and collaboration, and technology automation.”
According to Gitlab
“DevOps is a combination of software developers (dev) and operations (ops). It is defined as a software engineering methodology which aims to integrate the work of software development and software operations teams by facilitating a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility.”
According to Wikipedia
“DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.[1] DevOps is complementary with Agile software development; several DevOps aspects came from the Agile way of working.”
Advantages of DevOps
High Collaboration between teams: DevOps promotes an environment where different teams work together to achieve common organizational objectives. This means that any team in your organization won’t be isolated.
Speed: The faster you release great software to the end users, the faster you can embrace the business value of the product features, i.e better product delivery within a short period of time. DevOps speeds up the pace at which you deliver your software features and modifications through automated testing and integration. This decreases the time to monitor, locate, and fix bugs, which accelerates your time to market😍.
Greater innovation: this is a process of brainstorming new ideas, when implemented, will streamline operational workflows and add value to an organization. DevOps holds the key to unlock software development innovation.It allows you to deliver your software products rapidly.
Agility: One of the DevOps benefits for business is the overall increase in agility and efficiency in both proactive and reactive responses to business requirements. DevOps practices allow an organization to be flexible when it comes to balancing its capacity as a consequence to demand fluctuations. This helps to understand how the customers use the products and their overall preferences to continuously deliver features that bring value to them. It also makes it possible to handle features and requirements for several applications running on different platforms.
Software Stability, Quality and Reliability: DevOps ensures everything is under control, every change is noted and everyone understands the impact on quality through each release. DevOps adoption improves service reliability, as it improves the availability and connectivity of services needed for the smooth running of a business.
Cost Savings on Maintenance and Upgrades: A strong focus on performance throughout the lifecycle helps DevOps teams prevent deep-rooted bugs from causing permanent trouble. This helps to avoid unnecessary and expensive rework. This equates to improved profitability and a competitive edge, a solid DevOps strategy’s biggest benefit from a business perspective is maximizing profitability. Interestingly, there are multiple ways through which DevOps cuts down the costs incurred in a business either directly or indirectly.
Early defect detection: The collaborative DevOps environment fosters a culture of knowledge sharing across the teams. The automated, continuous monitoring and continuous testing of the code help improve the overall build quality. Teams are empowered to share their feedback with each other so that the defects are detected early as well as resolved early.
Greater customer experiences: The key reason to adopt DevOps in business is to be able to deliver top-quality services faster to the customers or end-users. Driving benefits around excellent customer experience and increased revenue is the best way to stay ahead of the competition. With DevOps, organizations can improve their deployment frequency by 200x, recovery times by 24x, and lower change failure rates by 3x. By automating the delivery pipeline, it becomes possible to ensure the reliability and stability of an application after every new release. When the applications perform flawlessly🥰 in production, organizations reap the benefit of greater customer satisfaction.
Greater automation: DevOps has greater benefits when compared to the traditional model as it helps in detecting and correcting problems quickly and efficiently. As the flaws are repeatedly tested through automation, the team gets more time in framing new ideas. In DevOps methodology, all of the departments are responsible for maintaining stability and offering new features. Therefore, the speed of software delivery is fast and undisturbed, unlike the traditional method.
Some other benefits of DevOps include:
More stable operating environments.
Better resource utilization.
Transparency leads to high productivity.
Greater visibility into system outcomes.
Individual improvement and cross-skilling.
Greater flexibility and adaptability.
Freedom to brainstorm and experiment.
Better process management.
Reliable and faster fixes, along with enhanced operational support.
Why we DevOps🤷♂️?
We need DevOps because it's a software development and operations approach that enables faster development of new products and easier maintenance of existing deployments. Companies that implement DevOps practices get more done, plain and simple. With a single team composed of cross-functional members all working in collaboration, DevOps organizations can deliver with maximum speed, functionality, and innovation.
Situation in which a DevOps approach would be most appropriate😘
DevOps approach can save you a tidy sum if you are working on an app where bug fixing is very an expensive process. When you are working on an application or software development, developers and testers are waiting for the working material to continue doing their jobs all the time.
DevOps Roles
A DevOps engineer requires a good balance between soft and hard skills to successfully implement a DevOps methodology. The responsibilities of the DevOps engineer will differ depending on the organization but generally , based on the most required skills, his/her main responsibilities include:
Writing documentation for server-side features
System analysis of the current system in use and developing plans for enhancements and improvements.
Continuous testing at different stages of the development cycle
Building, managing and setting up new development tools and infrastructure
Understanding the needs of stakeholders and conveying this to developers
Working on ways to automate and improve development and release processes
Cloud deployment and management
Testing and examining code written by others and analysing results
Ensuring that systems are safe and secure against cybersecurity threats
Performance assessment, monitoring and recommending performance enhancements
Identifying technical problems and developing software updates and ‘fixes’
Working with software developers and software engineers to ensure that development follows established processes and works as intended
CI/CD management and deployment
Planning out projects and being involved in project management decisions.
Some Challenges DevOps tries to solve;
Disunion: Lack of collaboration between developers and the operations team.
Choosing the Right Metrics is Hard: Companies transitioning to DevOps practices need to use metrics to recognize progress, document success, and uncover areas that need improvement. For example, an acceleration in deployment velocity without a corresponding improvement in quality is not a success. An effective DevOps effort needs metrics that drive smart automation decisions and yet organizations often struggle with DevOps metrics.
Time to Market: DevOps focuses on eliminating or at least reducing latency in software development. This means developers are able to shorten time to market by automating many of the bottlenecks common with legacy applications. One of the reasons this occurs is that DevOps helps organizations create the right environment for app development and modernization.
Enhanced quality with test automation: DevOps supports continuous testing throughout the entire production process. By integrating customer feedback and testing smaller fragments of new code alongside the current version, DevOps teams can implement new features and make security updates to existing products or services in a shorter span.
Improving problem resolution: One of the biggest values of DevOps is its focus on close collaboration and shared responsibility. When development and operations teams work together toward the same goal, it reduces organizational friction, leading to faster problem solving and better code and applications. DevOps creates a culture that aligns software development with the business, creating a sense of shared ownership among developers, operations, and security teams. A successful DevOps practice attunes all internal stakeholders to the business goal: to bring value to customers.
Too much focus on tools: With the exciting prospect of adopting DevOps, flashy new tools in the market can seem like they solve every problem. Whereas, with the introduction of new tools comes the need to train your staff on how to use them, ensuring they meet security requirements and are well-integrated with the existing infrastructure. The people on your team are the most important factor when transitioning to DevOps. If they’re not trained on the newly implemented processes and tools, there will be confusion, slowing down the adoption of DevOps practices.
Is DevOps Engineer a stressful job?
DevOps is neither stressful nor easy😕. It depends upon the given work context based on the mode of company. DevOps engineers are more frequently stressed than the IT average. Over 40% of them admit to being stressed “often” or “very often” compared to 34% of the IT average.
How Much Does a DevOps Engineer Make🙄?
The average salary for a DevOps Engineer in US is $126,875. The average additional cash compensation for a DevOps Engineer in US is $15,319. The average total compensation for a DevOps Engineer in US is $142,194.
The average Google DevOps earns $213,000 annually, which includes a base salary of $158,000 with a $55,000 bonus. This total compensation is $95,270 more than the US average for a DevOps. The Engineering Department at Google earns $3,242 more on average than the IT Department.
In conclusion
Other than it being a cross-functional combination of the terms and concepts for "development" and "operations", academics and practitioners have not developed a universal definition for the term "DevOps". Most often, DevOps is characterized by key principles: shared ownership, workflow automation, and rapid feedback. However, the term is used in multiple contexts. At its most successful, DevOps is a combination of specific practices, culture change, and tools.
That’s all for now, thanks for reading. With this, I hope you’re able to get what DevOps framework looks like. Watch out for my next publication, probably roadmap to DevOps, trust me you won’t want to miss it✌️. Please don’t forget to share it and subscribe!
Till next Friday🤗, bye👋👋.