CULTURE & PRACTICES
What is DevOps?
Uniting Development and Operations
DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.
01
Cultural Philosophy & Collaboration
Transitioning to DevOps requires a change in culture and mindset. At its simplest, DevOps is about removing the barriers between two traditionally siloed teams, development and operations. In some DevOps models, quality assurance and security teams also become more tightly integrated.
DevOps teams use practices to automate processes that historically have been manual and slow. They use a technology stack and tooling which help them operate and evolve applications quickly and reliably.
These tools also help engineers independently accomplish tasks (for example, deploying code or provisioning infrastructure) that normally would have required help from other teams, and this further increases a team’s velocity.
02
Continuous Integration & Delivery (CI/CD)
Continuous integration is a software development practice where developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository, after which automated builds and tests are run.
The key goals of continuous integration are to find and address bugs quicker, improve software quality, and reduce the time it takes to validate and release new software updates.
Continuous delivery expands upon continuous integration by automatically deploying all code changes to a testing environment and/or a production environment after the build stage. With continuous delivery, you always have a deployment-ready build artifact.
03
Microservices & Infrastructure as Code
The microservices architecture is the design approach to building a single application as a set of small services, where each service runs in its own process and communicates with other services through a well-defined interface using a lightweight mechanism.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a practice in which infrastructure is provisioned and managed using code and software development techniques, such as version control and continuous integration.
Thus, the cloud's API-driven model enables developers and system administrators to interact with infrastructure programmatically and at scale, instead of needing to manually set up and configure resources.
04
Monitoring, Logging & Communication
Organizations monitor metrics and logs to see how application and infrastructure performance impacts the end-user experience of their product. By categorizing and analyzing data, organizations understand how updates affect users, gaining insights into root causes of problems.
Active monitoring becomes increasingly important as services must be available 24/7. Furthermore, increased communication and collaboration in an organization is one of the key cultural aspects of DevOps.
DevOps teams set strong cultural norms around information sharing and facilitating communication through the use of chat applications, issue or project tracking systems, and wikis.