Webopedia defines DevOps – development and operations – as an enterprise software development phrase used to describe a type of agile relationship between development and IT operations. The goal of DevOps is to change and improve the relationship by advocating better communication and collaboration between these two business units.
Cloud has enabled software and systems to run across the globe. The complexity of keeping distributed systems in sync, while a new software release is being shipped, is increasing rapidly. DevOps is key to making sure that releasing software into complex or distributed infrastructures does not slow teams down.
For business, DevOps presents a number of tangible benefits. These are listed briefly below:
- Improve collaboration between teams;
- Speeds up time to market;
- Create stable/reliable operating environments;
- Detect and correct defects immediately;
- Continuous release, deployment, testing and monitoring.
While you may understand the benefits of DevOps, you probably have a few questions about this change in IT culture. Below, we unpack a few questions you may be too shy to ask.
Question one: How does DevOps benefit the development process?
Firstly, DevOps brings developers closer to the action and shortens the feedback cycle. According to a 2016 research report, high-performing DevOps organisations spend 22% less time doing unplanned work and rework and 29% more time on new projects, like working on features and functionality that customers and business really need.
Question two: Why the need for DevOps?
If you look at the market, companies want to be able to trial smaller software changes with their customers and do so more regularly. This allows them to more frequently receive customer feedback, which in turn increases customer satisfaction and creates better quality software. : DevOps strives that software value is delivered as rapidly as the value is produced. Teams that follow good Agile principles and rapidly produce incrementally valuable software will slow down time to market if they cannot release the produced value quick enough. Think of a factory producing 100 cars a week, but the distribution network is only able to reliably deliver 10 cars to clients per week.
Question three: How are DevOps and cloud related?
DevOps and cloud are both borne out of the same basic need for faster, more agile IT. The idea behind DevOps is that software should be built continuously, refined continuously, and shipped continuously and work across multiple platforms and architectures currently being used by the development and operations teams. This is important because development and operations teams typically use the same tools and share accountability for ensuring everything runs as it should.
Question four: How does DevOps differ from agile?
Agile is a set of principles around how to develop software. In order to actually put the software you’ve developed into action in a simple and safe way, you can use DevOps tools and techniques. So where Agile is an approach to software development, DevOps widens Agile’s principles to include systems and operations.
Question five: What are some DevOps success stories?
Etsy is an online marketplace where people around the world connect to buy and sell unique goods, selling everything from jewellery to art supplies. The e-commerce business initially experienced a lot of downtime when updating their website, which affected sales for millions of Etsy users. With the help of a new technical management team, they transitioned from its waterfall model to a more agile approach and now have a fully automated deployment pipeline, with more than 50 deployments a day and far fewer disruptions.
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