DevOps - an Introduction

Software Development Lifecycle has changed drastically over the past 10 years. DevOps has taken over the world and as more and more Development and IT teams are working in collaboration with each other, this DevOps culture has reached the top heights of the sky.

You must be surprised what is DevOps all about? Every individual in the IT industry is rushing towards DevOps skills but is DevOps all about skills, tools and technologies? The answer is No. DevOps is not only about tools and technologies but it also covers the other wide areas.

DevOps – Different people have different perception about what DevOps is all about. If we google about the definition, we will get hundreds of different definitions which ultimately messed up with the understanding of individual. Let’s discuss about its definition in a simple terms –

“DevOps is a culture that is focused to unify the collaboration between Development, QA and Operations team”. In other words, it is actually a practice of collaborating the development and operations team to work together in the entire software development lifecycle(from design through the development process to production support) 

People are often confused with Agile and DevOps. They assume both to be the same but in actual they are two sides of the same coin. Let’s discuss upon how agile came into picture.

Rise of Agile methodology

In 1950 and 1960s, software development was based upon waterfall approach. This waterfall approach holds that developer should first cater customer’s needs and then process through development until they release a single, finished software product that meets the stated need. It sounded good but it did not always work out. Over time, developers realized that this approach did not work well. By the time a “finished product” was released to the client, the client needed something different altogether. This mean that both time and money are spent backtracking, reorganizing goals, and throwing out pieces of the development that aren’t needed any longer. This situation gave rise to agile methodology. 

       Agile methodology destroys the idea of a “finished product” (goal of the Waterfall approach). They laid down the approach that software development is iterative and incremental. It encourages developers to break down software development into small pieces called as “user stories”. This helps the developers to get faster feedback and to align their product with market needs.

From this, we can conclude that DevOps can be understood as a platform which enables us to execute the Agile Methodology smoothly.

DevOps vs Agile

Agile methodology lacks communication and this communication is being filled up by DevOps team as DevOps is a theory rooted in communication – both within itself, as the developers and operators have to coordinate, but also across other departments.They frequently communicates with ITOps to ensure secure and stable environments for testing. DevOps is mainly the widening of Agile’s principles to include systems and operations instead of stopping its concerns at code check-in. Apart from working together as a cross-functional team of designer, tester and developer as part of an Agile team, DevOps suggests to add operations as well in the definition of cross-functional team.

   It strives to focus on the overall service or software fully delivered to the customer instead of simply “working software”. It emphasizes breaking down barriers between developers and operations teams, and getting them to collaborate in a way where they benefit from combined skills.

Future of DevOps

After a recent survey, we get an idea about the upcoming trends in DevOps culture. The future of DevOps will probably see continued growth of the cloud, tools facilitating automation, containers, and company-wide collaboration. Here are a few points for it –

• ·       Containerization has gained popularity now-a-days. This is because Docker has become a bit bloated. Therefore, we can expect more evolution in Containerization and less virtualization.
• ·       Soon, DevOps will be in IoT companies. Code doesn’t get pushed without going through DevOps engineers. As such, the DevOps engineer must be trusted — they’ll have a significant amount of power.
• ·       DevOps and Continuous Delivery will change the software development economy as there are infinite releases that all work. Developers will not need to be in house, they can just put their code in the container and let people add to the production code.
• ·       Chef has new tools like Test Kitchen and Chef Script that enables users to test locally so they don’t have to wait for servers to spin up. Integration is better with different cloud services. This makes it easier, faster, and reduces costs.
• ·       Continuous delivery empowers anyone to release new features when they’re ready. Things will have been built and architected so it’s a push button release that no one can screw up.

I hope this blog provides you an insight about what DevOps is all about, how it comes into picture and what could be the future trend in it.