What is DevOps? Comprehensive Explanation

A combination of (software) development and (information technology) operations is Devops. The term Devops was coined by Patrick Debois in 2009. Basically, Devops practices concern to speed up the IT service delivery by undertaking agile practices for operations to work, rather a system-oriented approach. Such a technology is brought into practice that can influence the programmable infrastructure through the life cycle of development from designing to operating it. There is always a need for nimble software technologies which is why Devops was brought into practice to fulfill the needs of more integrated software lifecycle.

More so, DevOps is a blanket term for all the processes and practices that is focused on shrinking the lifecycle of software development through frequent updated features and attributes.

Root of DevOps

DevOps is a result of progressive minds of IT personnel and experts, the existence of which relates to two main predecessors:

• Enterprise System Management: Initially, the system administrators used the pivotal and crucial practices of ESM for Devops by managing the configuration, monitoring the system, automated interim and through a tool chain approach.
• Agile development: The core principle of agile software development is to iterate and continuously work on feedbacks to successfully fine-tune and bring into use a faster and more efficient software system. This is done by repeated testing, management, quality assurance and integration of the software project. Through designing of software to production support, all the practices are streamlined through different stages.

Thus, to lay it out in simple terms, Devops is an entire IT framework that completely focuses on integration, automation, communication of IT operations with software development to ameliorate the quality and speed of software delivery.

Objectives of DevOps

DevOps fulfills the following objectives:-

• DevOps works for the betterment of all the contributors from planning, designing up till delivery. All of this is done to further:-
• Bring down the rates of failure of new software releases.
• Reduce the lead time between the software fixes.
• Market the software more fastly.
• Better the frequency of deployment.
• Recover in a better time.

Working of DevOps

The culture of DevOps includes many themes or aspects that are worked upon which are collaboration, continuous automation, integration, monitoring, continuous testing, delivery and rapid feedbacks.

• Collaboration: The dissociation of both development and IT operations sectors was the very reason for DevOps to come into existence. This is why; the association or collaboration between the two sectors is undertaken and is considered important to fasten the delivery of the updated softwares.
• Continuous automation: To fasten the software deployment process, the requirement of different kinds of tools is fundamentally important in order to automate the entire deployment process of the software.
• Integration: Continuous integration is another theme on which DevOps relies simply because it is a ground rule or core principle on which agile development works. The developers need to communicate and integrate their work frequently so that conflicts related to the codes can be avoided to further shorten the time.
• Testing: Continuous testing of softwares is of vital importance to avoid the software failures or more so reduce the impact of software failures. Testing is not just specific to assure the quality of the product (software), but, it should be undertaken right from the designing or development stage. Quality is looked into at every aspect or stage in DevOps. The software is majorly tested for their speed and quality. However, testing though automated tools and continuously helps reduce the testing bottlenecks and efficiently manage time.
• Delivery: Continuous delivery is also focused upon in the Devops environment which typically means designing, testing and releasing the software for production repeatedly. The integration of these practices is very essential to make timed deliveries. Some software are directly released for users while some go back in development stages only to target reducing the impacts of software failures.
• Monitoring: Real-time monitoring is done for Devops so that the issues can be rightly identified and the performance glitches can be remedied at the same time. Both, server monitoring and application performance monitoring is carried out.

The commercial existence of DevOps is traced back to 2014 when renowned companies like Nordstorm, Lego and Target introduced the DevOps environment in their respective organizations.

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