DevOps 101 – All You Need To Know

Merging software development and IT operations, DevOps has gained traction and become a leading industry practice in the past few years. DevOps directly impacts business success in global enterprises and web-focused organizations. As a reason, DevOps started as a practice, became an integral approach for IT companies to bring efficiency and lower operational costs.

According to Gartner, DevOps will continue to get adopted for augmenting service delivery and fastening processes and releases. Combining development and IT operations together, organizations will continue to create strategic business value.

What does DevOps include?

As a bid to say goodbye to complex corporate work culture, DevOps was brought to heighten focus on the core functions of an IT organization, such as software development. Normally, during software development, several sub-fucntions such as requirement analysis, software design and architecture, programming, testing, deployment, and maintenance are performed. The methodologies range from the spiral model, waterfall model, scrum, and agile software development.

On the other hand, IT operation as an umbrella term covers many aspects. It covers infrastructure management, managing administrative process, handling software, and hardware support. When software development and IT operations were separately treated, it doubled the time, resources, and expenses. Also overlapped with responsibilities, delays and unwanted complexities, across relevant levels. Thus, DevOps’ combined approach sounded a viable move and was coined to increase efficient service delivery.

Adoption of the DevOps approach

DevOps was adopted to build a strong IT-oriented culture. It became the need of the hour since software development was hampered due to repeated mistakes, disproportionate allocation of resources, and service delivery delays. IT organizations planned to start it from the scratch. There was a dire need to improve TAT (turn around time), perform better RCAs, create relatable use cases, manage resources, cost, and organizational performance.

General practices to improve operations in every organization such as collaboration, information flow, new ideas, shared goals, and learning from failures became pillars for the DevOps approach. In return, the DevOps approach ensured several advantages. The focus from development was lifted only to be equally distributed between development plus operational efficiency. This new DevOps focus ensured that there is:

• Continuity of service delivery
• Faster product development
• Speedy deployment cycles
• Better feature development
• Simplified and less erroneous processes
• Faster recoveries in case of failure
• Less time to launch and enter the market
• Increased productivity across the levels

How DevOps is evolving

DevOps, in broader terms is related to operational efficiency. It has positively impacts application development and product iteration cycles. However, operational hurdles still continue to hold DevOps from raising the bar. So, where should the road lead to, in terms of evolving the best practices of DevOps?

Here is an answer. Today, DevOps functions are being replicated in other units. Concepts of BizOps (business and operations) and DevSecOps (Development, security, and operations) are being adopted to make organizational functions segregated and focused.

Additionally, with digitalization gaining momentum throughout the business sectors across the world, automation has also come under DevOps’ gambit. Since the automation of the software development infrastructure has become a new reality, DevOps is now forging into automation’s best practices.

DevOps has made automation of activities such as provisioning & configurations of servers, networks, and monitoring apparatus. While automation is making processes smart and manageable, DevOps practices is helping maintain the connection with existing developmental architecture. DevOps practices with automation have added efficiency, speed, collaboration, and accuracy to the delivery system, along with focusing on continuity of development, integration, and deployment. DevOps is crucial for streamlining focused operations, and on a similar stance, it has conjoined with automation infrastructure to provide value to overall IT infrastructure.