What is DevOps?

DevOps is a collaboration methodology between Development and Operations departments to manage software development services. Between them, they cover the complete product cycle, guaranteeing faster and safer processes, as well as continuous deliveries and better quality.

Talking about DevOps is not talking about a specific tool, nor a specific language or technology, but rather a collaboration between Dev (referring to development) and Ops (referring to operations) based on the agile methodology. Because there is no 'standard practices' framework that defines DevOps, but rather each custom software development company uses different tools to automate their tasks and streamline processes based on their structure and conditions.

So can we consider DevOps as an agile methodology? Not exactly, but we can consider it as an application of Agile fundamentals, both in the Development and Operations sections. The difference in relation to the agile methodologies themselves is that these are implemented only in Development, while DevOps also affects the Operations department.

What is DevOps for?

The collaboration between departments that occurs with DevOps allows organizations to deliver good quality software at a faster pace than if they used traditional management practices and tools.

This results in better communication between teams and greater customer satisfaction. Because being fast and offering quality at the same time is possible. And DevOps proves it day after day.

The practice of DevOps enhances integration, collaboration, visibility and transparency between the application development (Dev) team and the IT operations (Ops) team.

But be careful! Although it may seem that DevOps is some kind of corporate or business objective, it is actually conceived as a philosophy based on practices that help an organization deliver applications and services at high speed.

How does DevOps work?

The fact that Dev thinks like Ops and Ops thinks like Dev allows teams to function more coordinated and with fewer blockages in the various stages of the product lifecycle. And, for example, that any change in a product goes to production as quickly as possible.

To do this, organizations adopt software development methodologies and practices such as Scrum, Kanban or Agile.

We could say that the leitmotiv of DevOps is continuity and, therefore, its operation is based on:

Continuous development.

Continuous testing.

Continuous integration.

Continuous delivery.

Continuous deployment.

Continuous monitoring.

Infrastructure as code.

The close relationship between Dev and Ops is present in all phases of the product life cycle: from initial software planning to deployment and monitoring. This type of relationship allows for continuous feedback from the customer to continue improving, developing, testing and deploying. In this way, we quickly and continuously reach those changes necessary to enhance agile and cooperative workflows and production.

DevOps Philosophy

The practice of DevOps translates into the promotion of business innovation and the continuous improvement of production processes. It means ensuring speed, security and quality in a delivery (but also when applying changes or additions) and in the launch of a product or updates.

Because DevOps allows you to easily find where the error is so that, without wasting a minute, the machinery gets started applying the necessary changes to solve it and, all of this, seamlessly. Therefore, the DevOps philosophy allows you to solve any problem more quickly and simplify and automate processes, while achieving greater scalability and optimization of resources.

To reach this point, we must pay special attention to feedback, to be able to make corrections, as well as assimilate the need for continuous experimentation and learning: repeating, practicing and learning from mistakes will be the key to excellence and success.

What tools do you use?

We talk all the time about streamlining workflows and the need for operations to be more collaborative, but we still don't know how and when to do it. Well, below we list what the phases of the DevOps life cycle are, since, through them, we will learn about some of the most popular tools in DevOps.

• Plan: tools like Jira or Git allow us to track detected problems and manage the project. These tools will be key throughout the entire process, as they allow you to automate and 'pass tasks' from one to another without breaking the workflow. By the way, do you want to know what project planning is?

• Coding: in this case, Bitbucket, GitHub or GitLab are some of the tools with which we can create code and design software collaboratively.

• Build: Docker, Ansible, Puppet or JFrog Artifactory, among others, allow us to manage versions and compilations. Being able to release code and create packages with it helps maintain code consistency across different platforms and deployment environments.

• Test: as we indicated previously, carrying out continuous testing is one of the keys to DevOps to guarantee quality in programming. Some of the tools that testing frameworks offer us and that we can use in this phase are: JUnit, Blazemeter or Codeception.

• Deploy: Deployment involves the implementation of the management, coordination, programming and automation of the production of a product. Some of the most useful tools in this phase will be some of those we have already mentioned (Jira, Puppet, Ansible or Docker) and others such as Jenkins, Kubernetes or OpenShift.

• Operate: in this phase, to manage the custom software development services during production, we can use tools such as the aforementioned Ansible and Puppet or others such as PowerShell, Otter or Salt.

• Monitor: Monitoring the process will allow us to know where and when an error occurs in a specific version of the software in production. It will also help us know when and how to apply an operational change during the production process. In this phase we can use tools such as: Grafana, New Relic or Nagios.

Before getting into trouble, it is important that you look at the functionalities of each tool, since, sometimes, a single one can serve you for different phases of the DevOps cycle. Furthermore, observing how they can be integrated with each other will allow you to save a lot of time, resources and energy. Remember, agility and continuity, in addition to making a good rhyme, can and should be great friends.