Whenever software development comes up in conversation between people that know about the process, DevOps is often the next topic of discussion. Since 2009, DevOps has become the go-to software development methodology for professionals in the industry. Put as simply as possible, DevOps is no more than a set of processes that help coordinate and unify development teams and their own processes to complement the software development itself.
Its popularity and “hype” stems from the fact that it allows enterprises and companies to create and improve products at a much faster rate than more traditional software development methods of the past, such as the Waterfall method. While this sounds simple, many organizations hire experts in DevOps specifically or hire DevOps consulting services from a third-party.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is the union of development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams. This organizational approach not only makes it easier to develop software products and applications at a faster pace, but it also makes maintenance easier for any existing deployments.
By creating strong bonds, better communication, and improved overall teamwork between developers, operational professionals, and other important stakeholders, DevOps promotes shorter, more controlled interactions of the Software Development Life Cycle. This is also accomplished through the inclusion of industry best practices, new tools, and automation.
DevOps was born out of the merging of the agile development movement and lean manufacturing principles. Agile prioritizes short sprints of work with rapid iterations of feedback to create a much more responsive development process. Lean helps minimize waste during development and maximizes productivity. Through this process, constant planning, testing, and integration are at the forefront for the duration of the project to help ensure the quickest delivery of a high-quality product for release.
This methodology works in phases of build, validation, and deployment stages while focusing on the standardizing of development and increasing automation. This improves product predictability, maintainability, team efficiency, and security.
What’s unique about DevOps is that nearly every company tweaks the process to meet their specific requirements or needs, so no two “DevOps” procedures are ever going to be totally alike.
Why Does DevOps Matter?
From banking and entertainment to factories and healthcare, the internet and software have totally transformed the way the world and its industries work. Software no longer merely acts as a support tool for companies. Instead, it’s an integral component of the everyday tasks and inner-workings of most businesses.
DevOps emphasizes communication and collaboration between cross-functional teams to help build better products. DevOps focuses on addressing all issues quickly and everything related to a project is visible for every team member involved. This process equalizes the final responsibility for a final product and increases overall product quality through informed, timely feedback.
This means that the companies who depend on these vital software programs are able to rest assured knowing they have received the best possible product.
Reasons for the Hype: The Benefits of DevOps
DevOps continues to be the favorite development methodology – and with good reason. Below are a few of the reasons why the software and application industry has been so quick to adopt DevOps principles:
Faster Innovation with Shorter Development Cycles
When development and operations teams work as totally separate entities, it’s hard to tell if and when an application or product is ready for operations or deployment. Also, when development teams finish their tasks and simply turn over the product, the operational team scrambles and must extend timelines to get their part of the process completed.
By combining the development and operational aspects of development in the DevOps methodology, software and applications are ready for use much more quickly than they would be with other methodologies. As companies succeed based on their ability to innovate at a better, faster, and more productive rate than their competition, this shortened and enhanced collaborative process helps businesses stay ahead.
Reduced Failure Rates and More Recovery Time
Defects in programming are some of the biggest reasons why teams experience deployment failures. With DevOps, development cycles are shorter and promote more frequent code releases. This helps make it easier for quality assurance and testing professionals to spot code problems and bugs.
When working in the DevOps methodology, teams reduce the number of deployment failures by using agile programming practices based on collaboration and modular programming. When defects and issues do come up, it’s much easier to go through the rollback process as only some modules will be affected.
Recovery time is an important, yet often overlooked requirement of any kind of development as failure (at least to some extent) happens no matter how good a team or methodology is. Recovery from said failure is much faster when all of the teams involved work together to fix things.
Improved Communication
DevOps does more than just improve the software product. It also strengthens teams by improving the software development process itself. Combined teams are much more productive and typically happier. Instead of individual goals, overall performance becomes the focus of a DevOps-driven development project.
When teams work closely together and trust one another, they innovate and experiment more effectively, thus solving problems in a better way and coming up with new ideas. Teams also never experience periods of downtime while waiting for another department to finish up with tasks.
More Efficiencies and Better Security
DevOps also uses automation to ensure compliance throughout the entire process of development, which means better overall product security. This is possible thanks to practices such as policy and infrastructure as code. These policies allow companies to define what “compliance” means on a rather broad scale while it’s automatically monitored.
DevOps allows for acceleration tools as another opportunity to increase efficiency. Scalable infrastructures, such as cloud-based platforms, give more access to teams compared to hardware resources, which means testing and deployment operations happen at a much faster rate.
All Aboard!
Using DevOps practices comes with many benefits for organizations. Companies eagerly take advantage of faster application delivery, enhanced innovation, and performance-focused employee teams with this methodology. Although DevOps will continue to evolve and change along with technology, organizations will continue to benefit from the communication-driven, continuous environment of this methodology.
If you enjoyed this, be sure to check out our other DevOps articles.
