Introduction

DevOps has been described as a way of working where software developers and IT operations teams collaborate together as one large set of teams to create, test, and deliver software quickly and reliably. 

Rather than working as a relay race, DevOps works through collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement, allowing ideas to flow through the many layers from code to the production efficiently and how they should be executed, while maximizing the effectiveness.

A good illustration of DevOps would be to use a restaurant kitchen where it has chefs and servers working as a seamless team throughout the process of providing a great meal quickly and accurately.


Top Benefits of DevOps

1. Faster Delivery and Deployment

Instead of spending time and resources putting a build, test, and release pipeline together, you can cut down the time it takes to effectively get the software product you built as quickly as possible to market.

2. Better Collaboration and Communication

DevOps represents a breaking down of the barriers that have historically existed between development, operations, and QA teams. DevOps practices focus on creating a culture of shared responsibility and better communication as a team

3. Efficiency Gains through Automation

By automating the more routine tasks, such as testing, provisioning infrastructure, and deployments, you are reducing the amount of human error, and you are allowing your developers to spend time doing the more important work.

4. Enhanced Quality and Reliability

Utilizing automated testing allows for earlier defect detection in the development cycle, and monitoring tools allow for quicker identification of issues when operating within production - and faster remediation of those issues.

5. Improved Security

DevSecOps starts integrating security checks early in a project pipeline. Automated compliance and policy checks improve an organization's overall security posture.

6. Scalability and Flexibility

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) allows you to scale any resource in a consistent, fast and safe manner. Cloud native tooling reduces a lot of complexity of administering large and/or complex systems.

7. Continuous Improvement and Innovation

Monitoring tools and direct user feedback contribute feedback loops that will help software evolve quickly. This facilitates experimentation, iteration, and software design improvements from observations of the actual use of the software.

8. Improved Monitoring and Performance Metrics

Use cases, such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, provide great visibility into application health and infrastructure health, and help teams to think more proactively than reacting to issues.



The DevOps model can basically be imagined as a cycle of processes:

Plan – Developing the plan

  • Picture your team gathered around a table with coffee and sticky notes laying out ideas.
  • You are asking some questions - "What are we building? Who needs it? What steps are we going to take to get there?"
  • As a group, you break the larger vision into smaller tasks - you look at a series of to-do cards that can then be worked on in the next sprint.

Build – Writing the code

  • The developers get started and begin typing, building out the features one line at a time.
  • They are using version control tools, like Git, it's like a super-powered “undo” button and also serves as a journal for every change.
  • You can look back and see what was changed, who changed it, and why it was changed - nothing is lost!

Test – Preventing mistakes from happening too late

  • As soon as any new code is added, automated processes will kick off, check the code, and evaluate and flag any issues.
  • It’s like you have an automated proofreader who shines a light on the modified code when it runs tests but is able to do that every second without being tired.
  • If something doesn't work, it pops up right away - so issues can be resolved when they are easier to address.

Release – Starting the Work

  • When everything looks good, the code takes a trip to another area called staging, where you can look it over one last time. Once you give a final thumbs-up on it, it goes live, which may mean rolling it out to all customers or possibly to just several lucky testers. In many ways, it's like opening the doors on the front of a new store: smooth, controlled, and planned. No surprises. 

Monitor – Keeping the Vigil 

  • When it's live, tools keep an eye on what's going on: tracking crashes, slow-loading pages, or strange behavior. You're like the night watchman, with a guard watching over your logs and metrics 24/7. If something breaks or begins to slow down, you see it immediately and fix things before your users even notice!


Important Responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer

As a DevOps Engineer, you will be improving speed, reliability, and security in the software delivery pipeline, working together from development to operations. The purpose of being a DevOps Engineer is to do this.

DevOps CI/CD Pipelines: Fully automate every element of the CI/CD process and allow more changes to production at speed and with the lowest potential for errors.

Infrastructure management: design and construct flexible, and scalable cloud platforms, and environments using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) capabilities through tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation. 

Monitoring and orchestration: You will need to monitor tooling to ensure your applications and infrastructure are healthy; it will be necessary to whatever logging and metrics are available so you can troubleshoot if your infrastructure is down or applications are down.

Integrating Security (DevSecOps): Apply tools and policies to the CI/CD pipeline to determine how vulnerabilities and defects can be detected sooner.

Cross-team collaboration: You will be working alongside developers, testers, and other Cloud and IT teams with the goal of developing an integrated environment with related processes while fostering and iterating on a collaborative and iterative culture with you, the developers, and testers.

Containerization & orchestration: Use Docker to create an application container(s) and profibility use an orchestration tool, like Kubernetes for deployment.

Automation through scripting: Use scripting languages - like Bash, Python or Groovy - to help automate various systems and processes to create efficiencies for your team.

Backup & Disaster Recovery: Put in place clearly defined processes to back-up, on demand, the data in your production systems as well as providing a process to recover service as quickly as possible when systems fail.


Top DevOps Tools You Should Know

Final Thoughts

DevOps is not merely a trend; DevOps is a cultural influence that facilitates teams to know how they can move quickly, build better, and be aligned. Whether you are a developer looking to release code quicker and more accurately, or an operations engineer trying to automate a repetitive task, DevOps provides us with a great toolkit to explore our current workflows. DevOps continues to evolve with technology - GitOps, DevSecOps, AIOps, and other emerging practices ensure that systems are not only operating but flourishing.