What is DevOps? DevOps Methodology, Principles & Stages

In the early 2000s, there were two departments in software development: developers and system administrators. System administrators were responsible for deploying and integrating the code written by developers. They rarely communicated with each other.
Fast-forwarding to the 21st century, Agile and continuous workflows are some of the most common software development methods. To meet market demands, brands adopt the DevOps approach. It simplifies software development, deployment, maintenance, and management at scale.
Before that, know DevOps, its principles, methodology, and the stages involved. Continue your reading to know all the essential details about DevOps in depth.

Idea:

A guide to understanding DevOps and the benefits of using the methodology.

Outline:

1.DevOps Methodology

DevOps methodology is a set of practices and tools that help organizations speed up software development and delivery.
The purpose of the DevOps methodology is to shorten the software development life cycle, increase the quality of software, and deliver features and updates faster and more efficiently.
In addition to speed, the DevOps methodology also emphasizes collaboration between Development and Operations teams. These teams can better understand each other’s goals and objectives by working together. This understanding leads to better communication and collaboration throughout the software development life cycle.
If your organization is looking to speed up software development and delivery, then the DevOps methodology is right for you.

2.DevOps principles

The principle of DevOps is to establish a set of communication and collaboration between software developers and IT operations. The goal is to provide a culture, set of practices, and tools that enable organizations to deliver value to their customers continuously.
To achieve this, DevOps teams need to focus on four key areas:

Culture: Establishing a culture of collaboration between developers and IT operations is essential to the success of DevOps. Without strong communication and collaboration, it will be challenging to implement DevOps practices effectively.
Practices: There are a number of practices that are essential to the success of DevOps, including continuous integration, continuous delivery, and DevOps automation.
Tools: Various tools are needed to implement DevOps practices effectively. Some of the most popular DevOps tools include Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Puppet, Chef, and Ansible.
Measurement: DevOps teams need to be able to measure the success of their efforts to improve continuously. Some key metrics that DevOps teams should track include lead time, deployment frequency, and mean time to recover.
By focusing on these four key areas, organizations can establish a successful DevOps practice and continuously deliver value to their customers.

3.History of DevOps

Since the early days of computing, developers and operations teams have been working in silos. Developers would write code, and operations teams would deploy and manage the infrastructure. However, this approach led to a number of challenges, including slow deployments, frequent outages, and difficulty in implementing new features.

Before DevOps, we had two approaches for software development, namely the Waterfall and the Agile.

Waterfall model

The waterfall model is a sequential software development process in which progress flows steadily downwards like a waterfall, from the initial requirements gathering to the final implementation.
This model has various starting with Requirements gathering and analysis. These are the steps where you get the requirements from the client for developing an application. After this, you try to analyze these requirements.

The next step is the Design step, where you prepare a software blueprint. Here, you think about how the software is going to look like.
Once the design is ready, you move to the Implementation step, where you begin with the coding for the application. The team of developers works together on various components of the application.
Once you complete the application development, you test it in the Verification step. Various tests are conducted on the application, such as unit testing, integration testing, performance testing, etc.
After all the tests on the application are completed, it is deployed onto the production servers.
At last, comes the Maintenance step. In this step, the application is monitored for performance. Any issues related to the application’s performance are resolved in this step.

Advantages of the Waterfall Model:

1. It is easy to understand and implement.

2. Each stage is well-defined and can be completed relatively independently.

3. It is easy to monitor and track progress.

4. It is suited to projects where the requirements are well understood.

Disadvantages of the Waterfall Model:

1. It can be inflexible – it is difficult to make changes once a stage has been completed.

2. It can be difficult to manage risks.

3. It can be slow – each stage must be completed before moving on to the next.

4. It can be costly – if changes are required, they may need to be implemented in subsequent stages, which can be expensive.

Agile Methodology

Agile Methodology is an iterative software development approach where the software project is divided into various iterations. Each iteration has steps like the waterfall model: plan, Design, Development, Testing, and Maintenance. The duration of each iteration is generally 2-6 weeks.

Agile Process

In Agile, a company releases an application with high-priority features in the first iteration.
After its release, the customers or end-users give you feedback about the application’s performance.
Then you make the necessary changes to the application and some new features, and the application is released for the second time, which is the second iteration.
You repeat this entire procedure until you achieve the desired software quality.

Advantages of the Agile Model

1. It helps software development teams to be more flexible and adaptable

2. Provide a better-quality product and makes it highly error-free

3. Improve communication and collaboration

4. Agile model can help to improve the quality of the software developed

Disadvantages of the Agile Model

1. Agile requires a lot of communication and collaboration between different team

2. Highly dependent on precise customer requirements

3. Quite Difficult to predict the time and effort for larger projects

4. Not suitable for complex projects

4.What is DevOps, and what are the benefits of using the methodology?

DevOps is a term for a set of practices that combine software development (Dev) and information technology operations (Ops) to streamline the delivery of software products and services.
Development and operations teams work together in a DevOps environment to complete tasks and projects more efficiently. This collaboration often leads to faster software delivery, improved quality and reliability, and better communication and collaboration between teams.

Some of the benefits of using DevOps methodology include:

Increased speed and agility: DevOps enables organizations to deliver software faster and more efficiently.
Improved quality and reliability: By automating and improving software development and delivery processes, DevOps helps organizations to deliver higher quality software.
Increased collaboration and communication: DevOps fosters increased collaboration and communication between development and operations teams, which leads to better software.
Greater customer satisfaction: DevOps helps organizations better understand and respond to their customer’s needs, resulting in increased customer satisfaction.
Improved competitiveness: DevOps helps organizations to be more agile and responsive to market changes, which gives them a competitive edge.

5.DevOps Tools and Stages

There are many different approaches to DevOps, but most practitioners agree that there are four distinct stages in the DevOps lifecycle: Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Monitoring, and Continuous Feedback. Each stage requires different tools and processes, so it’s important to understand what’s needed at each stage to implement DevOps successfully.

Stage 1: Continuous Development
Tools Used: Git, SVN, Mercurial, CVS
Process Flow:

·        This phase involves planning and coding the software. You decide on the project vision during the planning phase, and the developers begin developing the code for the application.
·        No DevOps tools are required for planning, but there are many tools for maintaining the code.
·        The code can be in any language, but you keep it using Version Control tools. This process of maintaining the code is known as Source Code Management.
·        After the code is developed, you move to the Continuous Integration phase.

Stage 2: Continuous Integration
Tools: Jenkins, Travis, TeamCity
Process Flow:

·        In this stage, code changes are integrated into a shared code repository on a regular basis, usually multiple times per day.
·        This allows for early detection and resolution of conflicts and makes it easier to track the impacts of code changes.
·        To support Continuous Integration, developers need access to a shared code repository and automated build and test tools.
·        The code supporting new functionality is continuously integrated with the current code. Since the software is continuously developing, you need to continuously integrate the updated code with the systems to reflect changes to the end-users.
·        In this stage, you use the tools for packaging the code into an executable file to forward it to the next phases.

Stage 3: Continuous Testing
Tools: JUnit, Selenium TestNG
Process Flow:

• In this stage, you test the developed software continuously for bugs using automation testing tools. These tools allow Quality Assurance (QAs) to test multiple code bases in parallel to ensure no flaws in the functionality. In this phase, you can use Docker Containers to simulate the test environment.
• Selenium is used for automation testing, and TestNG generates the reports. You can automate this entire testing phase using a Continuous Integration tool called Jenkins.
• Suppose you wrote some selenium code in Java to test your application. Now you can build this code using maven or ant. Once you build the code, you then test it for User Acceptance Testing (UAT). This entire procedure can be automated using Jenkins.
Stage 4: Continuous Deployment
Tools Used:
Configuration Management – Ansible, Chef, Puppet
Containerization – Docker
Process Flow:
• In this stage, you deploy the code on the production servers. It is also important to ensure you correctly deploy the code on all the servers. Before moving on, let us understand a few things about Configuration management and Containerization tools. This set of tools here helps in achieving Continuous Deployment (CD).

• Configuration Management is the act of establishing and maintaining consistency in an application’s functional requirements and performance. It releases deployments to servers, schedules updates on all servers, and, most importantly, keeps consistent settings across all servers.
• Containerization tools are also important in the deployment step. The containerization tools help produce consistency across Development, Test, Staging, and Production environments. Besides this, they also help in scaling up and scaling-down instances swiftly.
Stage – 5: Continuous Monitoring
Tools Used: Nagios, Splunk, ELK Stack
Process Flow:
• This is a critical stage of the DevOps life cycle in which you regularly monitor the performance of your application. This is where you keep track of information about the use of the software. You then process this information to check the proper functionality of the application. In this phase, you resolve system errors such as low memory, server not reachable, etc.

This practice involves the participation of the Operations team, who will monitor the user activity for bugs or any improper system behaviour. The Continuous Monitoring tools help you monitor the application’s performance and the servers closely and enable you to proactively check the system’s health.
Lastly, we will discuss what exactly is a DevOps Engineer.

6.What is a DevOps Engineer?

A DevOps engineer is a professional specializing in developing and operating software systems. DevOps engineers are responsible for software applications’ design, deployment, and maintenance. They work with developers to ensure that code is written to specification and that it meets the needs of the Operations team. DevOps engineers also work with Operations to ensure that applications are deployed smoothly and operational.
DevOps engineers typically have a strong background in both development and operations. They are well-versed in the latest software development tools and practices, and they have a deep understanding of how software systems work. DevOps engineers often utilize their skills to streamline the software development process, reducing the time and effort required to bring new applications to market.
If you’re interested in becoming a DevOps engineer, there are a few things you should keep in mind.

DevOps is all about collaboration. DevOps engineers need to be able to work effectively with other members of the development team, as well as with other IT professionals.
DevOps requires a solid understanding of both development and operations. DevOps engineers need to be able to code and understand software applications’ inner workings.
DevOps is a fast-paced environment. DevOps engineers need to be able to deploy new applications and systems rapidly.
If you have the skills and background required, becoming a DevOps engineer can be a great way to further your career in the software development field.

Summary:

DevOps software development methodology is gaining in popularity due to its benefits. They are designed to help improve the communication and collaboration between development and operations teams. In this blog post, you will understand what DevOps is and the benefits of using the methodology. And also, we’ve covered the History of DevOps, DevOps Tools, and stages.