The definition of DevOps can be confusing and difficult to understand. However, this approach really matters because it's the fastest way to market.
With DevOps, you can increase your developer team's agility and responsiveness to user feedback — or changing customer needs. Also improve your application completion time, without losing quality.
In a “traditional” development process, developers work individually on tasks from start to finish. For example, the design phase of a project would be completed by a single professional, and he would pass his work on to someone else who would take over for the next phase.
The problem is that tasks don't always flow seamlessly from one production stage to another. Sometimes they overlap or need revision as new information comes in and it takes time for each developer to communicate with the others.
This process results in everyone working in isolation, generating extra work and wasted time. Which makes it difficult to make changes or fix bugs because you can't do anything to get feedback until much later in the development cycle.
The least efficient part of this process? Quality Assurance Testing — the stage where we ensure that everything is working as it should.
Top DevOps practices
In very direct terms: DevOps practices aim to improve collaboration between Development and Operations by standardizing how they work and improving automation. They include:
continuous integration
Continuous Integration is a software development practice for frequently integrating new code into the master branch. It reduces the time it takes for new features and bug fixes to be added to an app by running automated tests before merging changes into the master branch.
In practice, continuous integration uses infrastructure provided by developers to run tests. And these will also use infrastructure for building and storing artifacts, hosting a central location where an automated installer can store artifacts before they are collected.
continuous delivery
Continuous delivery refers to the ability of developers, through automation, to push features and bug fixes from development to a test or production environment.
It aims to reduce the time between when developers make a change and when that change is available in a production environment.
This practice uses the development infrastructure for any necessary integration, staging, and deployment environments.
Additionally, it creates a separate development branch that can be deployed to a production or QA environment if needed.
test automation
The term test automation refers to the ability of development, through automation, to test code changes before promoting them for continuous DevOps deployment.
This is a practice that aims to reduce the time between when developers make a change and when they know if that change broke something in the application.
Here, you use the development infrastructure for any DevOps tools needed for test automation. In addition, a test branch is created that can be applied in Dev, QA or production environments if needed.
Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a process that uses scripts to manage server, cloud, and configuration virtualization.
Teams can use scripts to automate repetitive tasks, allowing them to scale their DevOps practices.
DevOps teams will streamline their pipeline workflow process by integrating multiple tools into the toolchain; they can also automate processes with pipelines.
IaC and DevOps practices work together because DevOps requires the development team to integrate their code with the operations team to deliver and keep systems running.
configuration management
Configuration management is a key component of DevOps to create a process whereby servers and other infrastructure in the enterprise environment can be quickly and easily provisioned.
For example, it can apply configuration changes to an entire network when only one server needs the change. It also allows administrators to remotely push scripts to systems that would otherwise require physical access.
In this process, hosts are configured so that they are easy to configure with code. This means that changes are standardized, making it much simpler to configure everything without wasting developers' time.
This is achieved through configuration management tools that track all changes made. If an error occurs, they can also quickly revert to a previous configuration.
monitoring and recording
Monitoring and logging are essential aspects of DevOps practices because they follow the general rule of “see what you expect”. When something goes wrong, we can find these issues by looking at logs and monitoring metrics.
The purpose of monitoring and logging is to be proactive and avoid interruptions and interruptions. For example, we could monitor our web servers for latency and then act before something happens like a DDoS attack.
The benefits of monitoring are that we can catch problems before they cause an outage. Therefore, in any company that wants to maintain a healthy DevOps culture, it is necessary to have a clear monitoring and recording process.
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