What is DevOps? Life Cycle Guide and Key Practices

DevOps is a set of procedures that require a cultural change in companies. It's a movement, it's the desire to do things in a way that focuses on communication, collaboration and integration between those who develop and those who operate, to build more agile and efficient teams.

Lately, the word “DevOps” has taken on a lot of relevance. If it were about clothing, it would be the latest trend in fashion, but we need to clarify something: to say”We are DevOps”, you need knowledge in different areas and also have previous experience.

DevOps is a fundamental culture of modern software practice for successful analytics and big data projects.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of methodologies and good practices, it is an approach to work that seeks to improve the delivery of software in a shared and responsible manner. Its name comes from the union of two words”DevElopment” and”OpErationS”, that is, Development and Operations.

In a technology project, we find two large groups. On the one hand, there are the developers who are responsible for developing the pillars and ensuring the efficiency of the programs and their purpose is to produce software. On the other hand, there are the operators and their purpose is to maintain the stable operation of the product. Both sectors prioritize their objectives, and often there is not good communication between them. This is the 'traditional' model of work, where everyone works independently. Companies today need to launch products quickly. With this traditional model, it's impossible.

This is where the concept of “DevOps” was born, where communication, collaboration, integration and automation prevail. When the wall falls, the first thing you enable is a flow of communication between developers and operations.

Finally, a culture of learning must be created, it is very important that the team is constantly learning. Some companies, such as Netflix, 'sabotage' their products themselves to know what is wrong, to identify flaws in the system, and to learn from mistakes to improve.

The term 'DevOps' has been mutating over time. First it was the union of developers and operations, but today it represents another type of union, since the idea of this term is to unify and connect. Some examples:

DevSecOps - this is a form of union between developers, security and operation,

QAops - is the union of QA and operations,

NoOps - it's a case where you don't want the operations team to exist anymore. Here teams must be able to self-organize to deploy,

DataOps - is the union of Data Scientist and the operations team.

The important thing to note is that the term DevOps breaks the barrier between teams, to improve communication, collaboration, and integration in all areas. This article addresses the discipline of DevOps.

Stay tuned to our blog and future posts from other disciplines.

Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment (CD) and Continuous Delivery

One of the first practices in the development area involving DevOps is continuous integration.

Continuous integration is a software development practice where developers make changes to the code in a repository on a periodic basis.

The proposal is not to create large pieces, but to create parts of a piece and every time these pieces consider it large enough to do an integration test, that development is released to a continuous integration tool.

The tool periodically validates that the different teams are integrated. Jenkins is one of the best-known tools for automating tests.

On the Operations side, we have two applications: continuous delivery and continuous deployment.

Continuous delivery is a software development practice to automatically prepare for changes to the code and deliver to the production phase.

Continuous deployment It is a development practice to deploy our software in production WITHOUT human intervention when deploying it.

The difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment is that the former requires manual approval before implementation, while the latter performs approval automatically.

DevOps lifecycle

The DevOps lifecycle corresponds to the steps taken by the source code of a software to be deployed in an environment. In other words, it is the set of steps taken by a piece of code to reach the destination and become an application.

Let's start with the phase Of planning - decide what and how you are going to do. Then comes the coding phase When specialists start coding, the next phase is Of construction: it takes all the code from all the specialists and compiles it, then comes the testing phase in which we apply automatic tests to each artifact that has just been built Then comes the Release phase where we take what was built in previous phases and store it in an accessible place so that the process can continue.

Then comes the deployment phase This one takes what was created earlier and tries to deliver it to the user, the next one is the operation phase This one is about the configuration of environments and the structure as such, finally there is the monitoring phase is where they review the metrics and make sure everything is OK. Below we will give a more detailed explanation of each one.

Phase 1 - Planning

All projects, regardless of the area or theme, need a vision that indicates to all participants the reason and purpose of the work to be done. At this stage, you define a minimum set of functionalities that provide value in each iteration and the acceptance criteria to be met. Communication between the business and the development team is key.

Start by developing a plan to achieve the set objective. All the people involved work during the iteration to achieve a clear objective. Then you define the tasks of the team and state the requirements to be implemented in the platform or product.

Phase 2 - Coding

After defining the plan, we proceed to code the application according to the requirements agreed with the customer. Here you start developing the project software. These developments advance in small processes in the development cycle.

At the same time, you begin to define the tests you will need to perform on your part to ensure that it meets the functional specification. On the part of operations, they begin building the necessary automations for and of the software. The project manager ensures that the development team is familiar with the use of security tools and possible attacks that this new piece of software may face.

Phase 3 - Construction

The objective of this phase is to build the application with the integration of several codes that were made in the coding phase. Once the application is built, it's time to create the new artifacts that make up the software, including the new functionalities. This process is critical because an error in the code union can cause the project to stop working.

In this phase of the DevOps lifecycle, software development is continuous and iterative, with each part moving forward in the process. This is beneficial for the team as it speeds up the process and we ensure delivery.

Phase 4 - Testing

In this phase, you execute the tests to verify the correct functioning of all the characteristics of the project. You should consider not only new tests but also those that ensure compliance with the specification of existing functionalities.

The QA team uses tools to identify and correct errors in the new code on a continuous basis, in the event that any test is not satisfactory you can make the correction by returning to the previous phase (Construction)

In the planning stage, you have already defined the unit and integration plan that you will carry out.

Phase 5 - Launch

Once the application has passed all the functional and integration tests, you can create a version of the software. The objective is to indicate that it has passed all previous validations, these validations can be used by users in the future. This phase is integrated with existing code, tests are carried out and it should be noted that continuous development is only possible due to continuous integration and testing.

Phase 6 - Operation

This is the phase where the operating team takes control of the production application. You must ensure that there are no strange or inappropriate behaviors, errors that you may encounter in production. You must alert other members of the team to the problems that have occurred, make immediate decisions (suspend, rollback, etc.) and plan the necessary improvements before returning to production.

Phase 7 - Monitoring

In the last phase, you establish which are the parameters to monitor for the application. We will collect all the information collected over a period of time to make necessary adjustments in the next planning phase. It is also in this phase that the operating team defines measures to monitor and control the health status of the applications and their infrastructure.

Conclusion

When teams work independently, errors can arise in the project. This leads teams to blame others, losing the focus of the situation, which is to solve the problem, both areas together must first identify what the problem is and then solve it

This is why this new culture was born, to solve these types of problems and to break the wall that divides them. DevOps was created with the objective of uniting the different teams or people participating in a project. The idea is that all teams have a common goal, to enable and facilitate innovation, increase productivity and delivery of equipment, manage defects earlier, reduce unavailability and improve resilience.

If you want to adopt these DevOps practices, you should start by evaluating a cultural change in your team, adding new technologies, high communication between teams, greater collaboration and development, injecting agility into projects, and many others. Any organization can adopt the “DevOps” methodology and adapt it to its processes and will be more likely to succeed when creating, developing and delivering software.

Ready to implement DevOps in your organization?

At Kranio, we help you adopt DevOps practices that improve collaboration between teams and accelerate the delivery of high-quality software. Contact us and discover how we can boost the efficiency of your technological projects.