What is DevOps?

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DevOps is a collection of methods, technologies, and a mindset that automates and integrates software development and IT teams' processes. Team empowerment, cross-team communication and collaboration, and technology automation are all emphasised. People working together to develop, produce, and deliver secure software at top speed is what DevOps is all about. Through automation, collaboration, rapid feedback, and iterative improvement, DevOps principles enable software developers (devs) and operations (ops) teams to expedite delivery.

What are the benefits of DevOps?

According to Atlassian's 2020 DevOps Trends study, 99 percent of respondents stated DevOps had had a positive impact on their company. Faster and easier releases, increased team productivity, increased security, higher quality products, and happier teams and customers are all advantages of DevOps.

Speed : DevOps teams produce deliverables more frequently, with improved quality and consistency. Elite teams deploy 208 times more frequently and 106 times faster than low-performing teams, according to the DORA 2019 State of DevOps study. Teams can use automated technologies to build, test, and deploy software using continuous delivery.
Improved collaboration : DevOps is built on a collaborative culture in which developers and operations teams share responsibilities and work together. This increases team efficiency and reduces time spent on job handoffs and writing code that is tailored to the environment in which it runs.
Rapid deployment : DevOps teams improve products quickly by boosting the frequency and velocity of releases. Quickly deploying new features and fixing bugs might give you a competitive advantage.
Quality and reliability : Continuous integration and delivery practises ensure that changes are functional and safe, improving the quality of a software product. Monitoring allows teams to stay up to date on performance in real time.
Security : DevSecOps is an active, integrated aspect of the development process because it integrates security into a continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment pipeline. By incorporating active security audits and security testing into agile development and DevOps workflows, security is integrated into the product.

The DevOps lifecycle and how DevOps works?

The DevOps lifecycle begins with software development and continues with delivery, maintenance, and security. The following are the ten stages of the lifecycle :

Manage : DevOps closes the loop by incorporating input and lessons learned throughout the lifecycle into your continuing iteration.
Plan : DevOps lays out the work that has to be done, prioritises it, and keeps track of its progress.
Create : DevOps writes code, makes modifications, and talks with coworkers about them.
Verify : DevOps tests code automatically to ensure it is working properly.
Package : DevOps keeps the software in a form that allows it to be reused in the future.
Secure : DevOps uses static and dynamic tests, fuzz testing, and dependency scanning to determine whether the software includes vulnerabilities.
Deployment : DevOps distributes software to end users.
Configure : DevOps is responsible for the management of infrastructure and software platforms
Monitor : DevOps looks at how software affects infrastructure and users. It also provides information to aid in the appropriate response to situations.
Protect : DevOps ensures that the software's infrastructure is secure by ensuring that containers are up to date and locked down.

DevOps tools, concepts, and fundamentals

Across the application lifecycle, DevOps encompasses a wide range of approaches. Customers begin their journey to DevOps success with one or more of these approaches.

Source Code Management - Organizations searching for more efficient ways to coordinate changes to documents, software, photos, large web sites, and other collections of code, configuration, and metadata across multiple teams.
Agile Project & Portfolio Management - Teams seeking for a more efficient means of starting, planning, executing, controlling, and closing a team's work to fulfil particular goals and deadlines.
Continuous Integration (CI) - Teams searching for ways to automate the build and testing processes to ensure that code is consistently integrated and that tests are run frequently to reduce the amount of time spent manually running unit and integration tests.
Continuous Delivery (CD) - Teams seeking for automated techniques to develop, test, package, configure, and deploy programmes to a target environment.
Shift Left Security - Teams seeking for ways to uncover vulnerabilities during development and provide actionable information to enable developers to remediate vulnerabilities earlier in the lifecycle have defined goals and must satisfy particular success criteria by a certain date.
Monitoring and Feedback - Teams are searching for ways to incorporate monitoring into each deployed version, as well as the impact of application modifications on business value and user experience.
Rapid Innovation - Teams looking for ways to feed feedback back into the development, test, packaging, and deployment stages to close the loop and give real-time feedback from customers and production environments.

DevOps methodologies

DevOps is a direct descendent of agile software development, and it was formed out of the necessity to keep up with increased software development pace and productivity using agile approaches. DevOps emerged because of advances in agile development, which emphasised the need for a more holistic approach to the software delivery life cycle.

The term "agile development" refers to a number of iterative software development approaches, several of which have found their way into DevOps :

Scrum - a Framework for addressing complex adaptive challenges while providing the greatest possible value solutions.
Kanban - a method for organising product development that focuses on continuous delivery while minimising the development team's workload. Kanban, like Scrum, is a method for assisting teams in working together more efficiently.
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) - a set of organisational and workflow patterns designed to help businesses scale lean and agile processes. SAFe is one of a growing number of frameworks aimed at addressing the challenges that come with scaling beyond a single team.
Lean development - applying the concepts and practises of lean manufacturing to software development. Lean provides a conceptual framework, values, and principles, as well as best practises based on experience, to help organisations become more agile.
Extreme programming (XP) - is a software development process that aims to improve product quality and adaptability to changing client needs. XP promotes frequent releases with short iterations in order to boost productivity and offer checkpoints where new client requirements can be implemented. Other aspects of extreme programming include working in pairs or conducting extensive code reviews, unit testing all code, deferring programming of features until they are required, a flat management structure, code simplicity and clarity, anticipating changes in the customer's requirements as time passes and the problem becomes better understood, and frequent communication with the customer.

Who’s Adopting DevOps?

DevOps is making huge inroads into IT businesses all across the world, from early-stage startups to 100-year-old enterprises. According to one survey, 74 percent of businesses have adopted DevOps in some form.

What kinds of businesses are using DevOps? While web-native "unicorns" like Etsy, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix are frequently identified as DevOps leaders, today's DevOps leaders include businesses of all sizes. Other DevOps success stories in the headlines include mainstream media business Sony Pictures, financial services behemoth Barclays Bank, and construction materials manufacturer USG.

Surprisingly, companies are leading the trend, with 81 percent saying that DevOps is being used in some capacity within their firm. DevOps is also proving beneficial to small and medium-sized organisations (SMBs), with 70% claiming to use it. Significantly, there is ample evidence that the size of an organisation is not a reliable indicator of DevOps success.

The US Patent and Trade Office switched to DevOps and now sees 1,000 automated builds each week on average. Production containers, automated workflows, and microservices are just a few of the ways the General Services Administration (GSA) is modernising its IT operations to deliver projects faster and with higher quality.

List of few tools for DevOps

Version Control tools :
1. GitHub : Github is widely regarded as one of the world's largest and most advanced development platforms. On GitHub, millions of developers and businesses create, ship, and maintain their software. The following are some of its most notable features
  1. Collaborative Coding
  2. Automation / CI & CD
  3. Security including additional features for enterprise customers
  4. Project Management
  5. Source : github.com
2. Bitbucket : With over 10 million registered users, Bitbucket is an extremely popular platform. It's not simply a platform for hosting code, it's also a platform for code management. From a single platform, teams can plan projects, collaborate on code, test, and deploy. The following are some of its characteristics
  1. Tighter Jira and Trello integration.
  2. Integrated CI/CD to build, test and deploy.
  3. Pull requests and approve code review more efficiently.
  4. Keep your code secured in the Cloud with IP whitelisting and 2-step verification.
3. GitLab : It's an all-in-one DevOps tool that helps you release software quickly. It allows teams to do all duties, from planning to supply chain management to delivery to monitoring and security. Here are a few of its characteristics
  1. Single interface, single conversation thread, and single data store to manage projects effectively – Single source of truth.
  2. CI/CD for robust, scalable, and end-to-end automation to work together efficiently – Continuous Everything.
  3. Built-in functionality for Automated Security, Code Quality and Vulnerability management & with tight governance, your DevOps speed never slows down.
Container Management tools :
1. Docker : Docker is a lightweight technology that uses an integrated approach to simplify and expedite various activities in your SDLC. A docker container image is a self-contained, executable package that contains everything you need to run a programme. The following are some of its key characteristics that have helped it become a must-have among DevOps tools
  1. Standardized Packaging format for diverse applications.
  2. Container runtime that runs on various Linux and Windows Server OSs.
  3. Developers uses Docker for build, test and collaborate.
  4. Docker Hub to explore millions of images from community and verified publishers.
  5. Package, Execute and Manage distributed applications with Docker App.
2. Kubernetes : Kubernetes is an open-source DevOps solution that automates the deployment and management of containerized applications and is perhaps the most widely used container orchestration tool. The following features set it apart from other DevOps tools
  1. Make changes to your application or its configuration and monitoring application health simultaneously – Automated rollouts & rollbacks.
  2. It offers own IP addresses and a single DNS name for a set of Pods – Service Delivery and load balancing.
  3. Automatically mount the storage system of your choice.
  4. Self-healing capability.
3. Mesos : Apache Mesos is a DevOps tool for cluster management. It's a distributed systems kernel that manages and schedules resources across entire datacenters and cloud environments. It has the following features
  1. Offers native support to launch containers with Docker and AppC images.
  2. Supports cloud-native and legacy applications to run in the same cluster with pluggable scheduling policies.
  3. Runs on cross platforms like Linux, OSX and Windows.
  4. Scale to 10,000s of nodes easily.
Application Performance Monitoring tools :
1. Prometheus : Prometheus is a community-driven open-source performance monitoring system. It also allows you to monitor containers and set up alarms based on time series data. The following functionalities are included in the solution
  1. Scaling with the help of functional sharding and federation.
  2. Numerous client libraries allow easy service instrumentation.
  3. Powerful reporting capabilities through PromQL.
2. Dynatrace : Application performance, digital experience, business analytics, AIOps, and infrastructure monitoring are all covered. It has the following characteristics
  1. Automate orchestration with open APIs.
  2. Provides extensive cloud support and compatible with all major db technologies.
  3. Dynatrace APM solution provides automatic quality checks and KPIs.
  4. AI Driven problem detection and resolution.
3. AppDynamics : AppDynamics provides real-time insights into the performance of applications. This DevOps tool keeps track of and reports on all transactions that pass through your application. It has the following characteristics
  1. Agents are Intelligent and know when to capture the details of transactions.
  2. Solves performance problems through an analytics-driven approach.
  3. Automatically finds out normal performance and stop false alarms.
  4. Smart Analytics enables to find and fix issues from the very beginning.
  5. Enables full system-wide data recording.
Deployment & Server Monitoring tools :
1. Splunk : Splunk is a monitoring and exploration tool that is available as a SaaS or on-premises solution. It has the following features
  1. Monitor and troubleshoot across your infrastructure, including physical, virtual, or in the cloud.
  2. Modernize applications for better customer experiences through accelerated innovation.
  3. AIOps with Machine Learning for predictive alerting and auto-remediation.
  4. Improved Efficiency in MTTA with mobile-first, automated incident response.
2. Datadog : Datadog is a cloud-based DevOps solution for monitoring servers and apps in hybrid cloud environments. It also makes Docker container monitoring easier. Some of its more notable traits include
  1. Seamlessly aggregates metrics and events across the full DevOps stack.
  2. Offers end-to-end user experience visibility in a single platform.
  3. Prioritizes business and engineering decisions with user experience metrics.
  4. Built to give visibility across teams.
3. Sensu : Sensu is a devops tool for monitoring cloud environments that is open-source. It's simple to set up using Puppet and Chef. It has the following characteristics
  1. The Sensu Observability Pipeline is integrated, secure and scalable. Collaboration between development and operations relies on self-service workflows with integrated authentication solutions.
  2. Declarative setups and a service-based monitoring strategy allow you to define the monitoring insights that are most important to you, automating your workflows so you can focus on what matters.
Configuration Management tools :
1. Chef : Chef is an open-source DevOps tool for automation and configuration management built by Erlang and Ruby. Its features are
  1. “Cookbooks” which facilitates infrastructure coding in languages specific to domains.
  2. Easily integrated with cloud platforms like Amazon AWS, MS Azure, GCP etc.
  3. Configuration as code.
2. Puppet : Puppet is responsible for managing and automating your infrastructure and complex workflows in a simplistic manner. Features of this DevOps Tool are
  1. Automate and simplify critical manual tasks by extracting configuration details across various operating systems and platforms.
  2. When you have 100, 1000 of severs or a mixed environment or when you have to plans to scale your infrastructure, it becomes difficult to maintain all servers in a certain state - Puppet helps you in saving time and money, scaling effectively and do this effectively.
3. Ansible : Ansible delivers simple IT automation that ends repetitive tasks and frees up teams for more strategic work. Focusing on two key use-cases
  1. Configuration management – Aim to be the simplest solution and designed to be minimal in nature, consistent, secure and highly reliable, with a focus on getting started quickly for administrators, developers and IT managers.
  2. Orchestration - Ansible’s library of modules and easy extensibility, makes it simple to orchestrate different conductors in different environments, all using one simple language.
CI / Deployment Automation tools :
1. Bamboo : It's a DevOps tool that guides you through the entire Continuous Delivery process, from coding to deployment. It allows you to connect automated builds, tests, and releases in a single workflow. The following are some of its most notable features
  1. Allows users to create multi-stage build plans and set up triggers to start builds upon commits.
  2. Parallel automated tests unleash the power of Agile Development and make catching bugs easier and faster.
  3. Tighter integration with Jira, Bitbucket.
2. Jenkins : Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration and continuous delivery technology written in Java that automates your end-to-end release management lifecycle. Jenkins has become one of the most important DevOps tools due to the following features
  1. Used as a simple CI server or turned into the CD hub for any project.
  2. Easily set up and configured via its web interface, which includes on-the-fly error checks and built-in help.
  3. Easily distribute work across multiple machines, helping drive builds, tests and deployments across multiple platforms faster.
3. IBM UrbanCode : IBM UrbanCode, as a deployment automation and release management system, ensures that any combination of on-premises, mainframe, and cloud applications is delivered without interruption. The following are some of its characteristics
  1. Uses an enterprise-optimized solution along with development, testing and release tools to enhance build management.
  2. Automates application development, middleware configuration, and database changes.
Test Automation tools :
1. Test.ai : It is an AI-powered automation testing tool to release apps faster and with better quality. Its AI-Bots
  1. Build tests without coding or scripting.
  2. Accelerate testing to the speed of DevOps.
  3. Scale testing to any platform, any app.
  4. Maintain tests automatically and improve quality everywhere.
2. Ranorex : An all-in-one solution for any type of automated testing, whether it is cross-browser testing or cross-device testing. Its features include:
  1. All the tools you need for test automation comes in a single license.
  2. Test on real devices or simulators/emulators.
  3. Allows simple integration with CI servers, issue tracking tools, and more.
3. Selenium : It's mostly used to test online apps, but it can also be used to automate other web-based admin activities. There are three parts to this
  1. Selenium WebDriver enables you to build comprehensive, browser-based regression automation suites and tests, as well as scale and distribute scripts across a variety of settings.
  2. Selenium IDE is a Chrome and Firefox add-on that allows you to easily record and replay browser interactions.
  3. Selenium Grid allows you to scale your testing efforts by allowing you to run tests on several machines and manage various environments from a single location.
Artifact Management tools :
1. Sonatype NEXUS : Sonatype claims to be the world's #1 repository manager, distributing parts and containers to developers effectively and functioning as a single source of truth for all of your components, binaries, and build artefacts. It has the following characteristics
  1. Offers universal support for all popular build tools.
  2. Efficiency and flexibility to empower development teams.
2. JFRog Artifactory : As all container images, packages, and Helm charts go through the DevOps pipeline, it serves as the one source of truth. It has the following characteristics
  1. Scale with active/active clustering and multi-site replication for your DevOps setup.
  2. Allows you to choose the tool stack and integrates with your environment.
  3. Release faster and automate your pipeline via powerful REST APIs.
3. CloudRepo : Private Maven and Python repositories can be managed, shared, and distributed using this tool.
  1. Stores the repositories across multiple servers to ensure high availability.
  2. Easily provide or restrict access to your clients.
  3. Integrates with all major CI tools.
Codeless Test Automation tools :
1. AccelQ : AcceIQ is the market leader in DevOps Tools for codeless test automation. It's a powerful codeless test automation tool that lets testers create test logic without having to worry about programming syntax
  1. Adopts a design-first approach to test asset development, ensuring modularity and reusability with ease.
  2. Work with iframes and other dynamic elements.
  3. Provides support for advanced interactions and logic development.
2. Appvance : This autonomous testing platform powered by AI and machine learning does end-to-end testing as well as ML-assisted codeless scripting. It has the following characteristics:
  1. A level-5 autonomous test automation system.
  2. Self-healing scripts and AI-generated tests for 90 percent less effort application coverage and validations.
  3. Enables continuous testing in a DevOps setting.
3. Testim.io : AI-based UI Testing to assist you in running tests with super-fast scripting that improves coverage and quality. It assists you with your DevOps journey by :
  1. Integrating with tools like Saucelabs, Jira, and Github.
  2. Eliminating flaky tests and reduces maintenance.
  3. Pinpointing root cause to fix bugs and release faster.
  4. Efficiently expanding testing operations with control, management, and insights.

Summary

If you're thinking about implementing DevOps in your company, let Trajectus' specialists assist you in determining which DevOps solution will best fit your continuous delivery needs. We have engineers, architects, and business analysts with vast expertise implementing DevOps using cloud platforms and tools like as AWS, Azure, Oracle, IBM, and many others. Call one of our specialists today to discuss your use case (s).

THE AUTHOR

Avinash Panchal

Head of Information Technology