Traditional IT has two independent teams in any organization-development team and operation and maintenance team. The development team focuses on software development and releases the code after ensuring that it runs perfectly. The operation and maintenance team is committed to deployment, load balancing and release management to make software services available to the outside world.
They check application performance and report any issues to the development team. These cycles are too long for the company, spurring the need to build a team of mixed expertise consisting of development, quality assurance, and operation and maintenance, and introduce the phenomenon of DevOps. DevOps bridges the gap between the two teams and helps them operate and develop applications quickly and reliably.
The question is, how well do we really understand DevOps and why do we need it? This blog will address these issues and explain DevOps best practices that can help companies realize their true potential.
What is DevOps?
As the name suggests, Devops is related to development and operation and maintenance. It defines a set of processes that bring cultural changes to the organization through collaboration between development and operations teams. It contains four key components: collaboration, practice, culture and tools.
Why do we need DevOps?
DevOps brings a higher level of collaboration and speed, allowing organizations to shorten time to market, increase productivity, and reduce operation and maintenance costs to effectively provide services to customers and maintain market competitiveness. It also helps to release products faster, manage unplanned work, and capture and resolve critical issues faster.
Implement DevOps best practices
Set up a centralized unit
DevOps uses various tools such as Jenkins, Terraform, Nagios, Grafana, Prometheus, or Splunk. The organization should establish a centralized department to create and operate these tools. This centralized department is responsible for setting up agile practices in the development team. The team will research new tools and stick to them, and provide guidance procedures and training to implement DevOps.
Continuous Integration (CI)
CI is a software development practice that improves collaboration between teams and helps build high-quality software. The development team will periodically check in code changes in the repository, and CI will perform automatic builds and tests to verify code quality. The practice of continuous integration can quickly detect the challenges of the software development life cycle (SDLC) in the early stage, thereby helping the development team to solve the problem in the development stage itself.
Continuous deployment (CD)
The deployment process has multiple stages, such as development → build → verification → build version control → deployment → post-deployment, etc. The idea of continuous deployment is to automatically deploy the developed code to the production environment after passing all stages of QA (beta, integration, UAT, etc.) . There are some available tools, such as Spinnaker, Jenkins, Harness, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, etc., so that DevOps teams can set up automated pipelines that can be deployed in multiple environments with minimal manual intervention.
Continuous delivery is a practice of DevOps, in which the new code base is tested by the QA team at different stages of the automated and manual QA cycle. If the code base passes the QA cycle and is approved by the QA team, it will be deployed to the production environment. In this way, DevOps divides the team into shorter cycles, allowing the team to build, test, and release the code base faster and more frequently. This enables organizations to provide more versions, reduce manual deployment, and minimize the risk of failure in production.
Configuration Management (CM)
Configuration and change management are an important part of the DevOps cycle. Configuration management is the automation of configuration, monitoring, management and maintenance of all entities of the infrastructure and systems (such as servers, applications, storage, networks and all hosting services).
Configuration management brings many advantages, such as simplifying the setup of a new environment, reducing the risk of production configuration, and saving a lot of time in software development without having to spend time and effort to use infrastructure as a code practice to start a new service from scratch.
Change management
Change management is the process of requesting, planning, implementing and evaluating the requirements needed to meet new requirements. In the configuration management process, if any changes are needed in the existing systems and infrastructure, then change management should be considered at this time. The team proposing the change needs to clarify the change request, the reason for the change and the possible consequences on a larger scale, including the impact that the change may have on other systems.
Keep all teams on the same front
DevOps enables different departments to cooperate with each other, so communication is very important, and it is important to keep everyone on the same front to avoid conflicts in the team. In order to realize this strategy, the high participation and involvement of all teams and members is essential.
Test automation
Automated testing of each code base helps to run more tests, increase testing frequency, and save time spent on manual QA. This process can detect errors early, fix them, and improve the overall software quality. There are several tools that can be integrated with DevOps tools to achieve automated testing, such as Selenium, RobotFramework, Appium, XCUITest, JUnit, etc.
Continuous monitoring (CM)
Continuous monitoring is recommended to use several tools, dashboards and alerts to monitor all systems and infrastructure, including real-time insights into different indicators affecting the software, such as system performance, number of tests, success and failure rates, deployment status, error logs, and all Information is displayed in graphs, tables and detailed report formats. In order to complete such monitoring, the DevOps team can set up some tools, such as Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios, Appdynamics, NewRelic, Splunk, Logstash, and more tools available on the market.