DevOps Principles, Practices and Culture

Organizations across the globe are under pressure to continuously deliver new features and services faster than ever before, while ensuring that these changes do not adversely affect users or cause outages. DevOps has emerged as a set of practices and culture that helps organizations meet these challenges, by enabling them to rapidly and safely deliver software changes at scale.

In this article, we will explore the key DevOps principles and practices, as well as how it can help organizations transform their culture to one that is more collaborative and agile. We will also discuss some of the challenges that organizations face when adopting DevOps, and how these can be overcome.

What is DevOps?

DevOps stands for development and operations. It’s a method of integrating development, quality assurance, and operations (deployment and integration) into a single, continuous chain of procedures. DevOps principles are designed to shorten the feedback loop between these functions, so that changes can be made and deployed faster and more reliably. It is an add-on to Agile methodology and Lean thinking, which seeks to minimize waste and maximize efficiency in software development.

What is DevOps Culture?

A DevOps culture is one that values collaboration and communication between development and operations teams. It is a culture of continual learning, where experimentation is encouraged and failures are seen as opportunities to learn and improve. DevOps culture also emphasizes the importance of automation, so that repetitive tasks can be carried out quickly and reliably.

Principles of DevOps Culture

Collaboration

The goal of DevOps principles is to create a culture of communication and collaboration between development and operations teams. This often involves merging the two teams into a single unit that covers the full application lifecycle.

DevOps teams are responsible for ensuring that every aspect of the product meets high standards. This means that they take on full responsibility for developing features or products from start to finish. As a result, they need to have a good understanding of all aspects of the product. This increased investment and attachment from the team leads to higher quality output.

Automation

In a DevOps culture, automation is seen as essential for achieving speed and reliability. Automation can help to reduce the time it takes to carry out tasks such as building, testing, and deploying code. It can also help to ensure that tasks are carried out consistently and accurately.

Automation is central to the CI/CD pipeline, which is a key DevOps practice. The CI/CD pipeline is a set of automated processes that take code from development through to production. It includes steps such as code checking (continuous integration), testing (continuous delivery), and deployments.

Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement is a fundamental principle of agile practices, lean manufacturing, and Improvement Kata.  It is also a key component of DevOps principles and culture.

In a DevOps culture, continuous improvement means that teams are constantly looking for ways to improve their processes and tools. They also work to Automate tasks wherever possible. This helps to ensure that the team is always learning and improving, so that they can deliver value faster and more reliably.

One of the key ways in which DevOps teams achieve continuous improvement is through feedback loops. Feedback loops are a key part of the DevOps philosophy, and involve constantly seeking feedback from all stakeholders in the software development process. This feedback is used to make improvements to the way that software is delivered.

Customer-centricity

To create products and services focused on user requirements, DevOps teams utilize short feedback loops with users and customers. This helps to ensure that the products and services delivered are of high quality and meet customer expectations.

In a DevOps culture, customer feedback is seen as an essential part of the development process. Feedback should be sought at every stage of the development process, from initial requirements gathering through to final deployment.

Holistic thinking

In a DevOps culture, teams work to understand the full context of their work. This includes understanding the dependencies between different parts of the system, and how changes in one area can impact other areas.

Holistic thinking helps to ensure that DevOps teams can make informed decisions about the best way to deliver value. It also helps teams to avoid making changes that could have negative impacts elsewhere in the system.

DevOps Principles in Practice

There are a number of key practices that help to bring DevOps principles to life. These include:

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD)

CI/CD is a process in which code changes are automatically built, tested and deployed to production. This allows developers to make changes and push them out to production quickly and easily without having to go through manual processes.

Specifically, CI is the practice of automatically building and testing code changes, while CD is the practice of automatically deploying code changes.

CI/CD is a key part of DevOps, and enables organizations to release new features and updates faster, with less risk.

• Some of the benefits of CI/CD include:
• Increased speed and agility
• Reduced risk
• Improved quality

Continuous automated testing

A quality assurance team sets committed code testing using automation tooling such as Selenium, and others. This practice is essential for catching errors and preventing them from being deployed to production. Automated testing also helps to ensure that code changes do not break existing functionality. A Version Control System (VCS) like Git is used for managing and tracking code changes.

Continuous Deployment

Continuous deployment is the practice of automatically deploying code changes to production. This means that code changes can be made and pushed out to users quickly and easily, without the need for manual processes.

Continuous deployment helps to ensure that code changes are deployed quickly and efficiently, with minimal risk. It also allows developers to focus on adding new features and functionality, rather than on managing deployments.

Infrastructure as a code

By using infrastructure as code (IaC), DevOps teams can test apps in conditions that emulate production environments much earlier in the development process. This allows for more efficient and earlier detection of issues, ensuring a smoother development process overall. Additionally, Infrastructure as Code makes it possible to automate repetitive tasks that would otherwise be manual and time-consuming.

Due to IaC, the process of provisioning, configuring and managing infrastructure is much simpler and more efficient. As a result, DevOps teams can focus on more important tasks, such as adding new features and functionality.

Microservices

Microservices is an approach to software development in which apps are built as a set of small, independent services. This approach has a number of benefits, including increased flexibility and agility, and reduced complexity.

In a DevOps culture, microservices can help to improve the speed and efficiency of delivery. They can also help to reduce the risk of errors, as each service can be deployed and tested independently.

Additionally, microservices can help to improve the quality of software by making it easier to test and deploy code changes.

Containerization

Containerization is a technique for packaging and running apps in isolated environments. This approach has a number of benefits, including increased portability, reduced overhead, and improved security.

Containerization tools allow developers to package their apps into self-contained units that can be easily deployed and run on any supported platform. This enables apps to be quickly and reliably moved between different environments, without the need to recompile or repackage them.

Cloud-Native

Cloud-native is an approach to building and running apps that takes advantage of the benefits of the cloud. This includes using cloud services, such as storage and computing, to build and run apps.

Cloud-native apps are designed to be highly available, scalable, and resilient. They are also easy to deploy and manage, making them a good choice for DevOps teams.

How Your Organization Can Benefit from DevOps

There are many benefits that your organization can experience by implementing a DevOps culture.  These benefits can be seen in terms of improved communication and collaboration between development and operations teams, increased efficiency and productivity, reduced costs, and improved quality.

Improved Communication and Collaboration

One of the biggest benefits of DevOps is the improved communication and collaboration between development and operations teams. In a traditional waterfall model, these two teams often work in silos and have very little interaction. This can lead to a lack of understanding of each other’s needs and objectives, and can ultimately lead to conflict.

With DevOps, development and operations teams work more closely together from the beginning of the software development life cycle all the way through to production. This increased communication and collaboration leads to a better understanding of each other’s needs and objectives, and ultimately leads to more successful projects.

Increased Efficiency and Productivity

Another big benefit of DevOps is increased efficiency and productivity. In a traditional waterfall model, the development team works in isolation and then hands off the code to the operations team. The operations team then has to spend time understanding the code and deploying it to production. This can lead to a lot of wasted time and effort, and can ultimately lead to projects being delayed or even canceled.

With DevOps, the development and operations teams work together from the beginning of the project. This leads to a more efficient use of resources and a faster turnaround time for projects.

Reduced Costs

By automating repetitive tasks and workflows, DevOps can help to reduce the overall costs of your IT operations. In addition, by increasing communication and collaboration between development and operations teams, DevOps can help to reduce the costs associated with delays and rework.

Improved Quality

Finally, DevOps can help to improve the quality of your software. In a traditional waterfall model, the development team is responsible for coding and testing the software. The operations team is then responsible for deploying the software to production. This can often lead to errors and bugs being introduced in the production environment.

DevOps is fundamentally shifting how software is being built and delivered today. By automating workflows and improving communication between development and operations teams, DevOps can help organizations to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and improve quality. In order to realize these benefits, organizations need to embrace a culture of DevOps.

At Agileseventeen, we help organizations to implement DevOps practices and culture. We have a team of experts who can help you to transform your organization and take advantage of the benefits of DevOps. Contact us today to learn more at talkagile@agileseventeen.com