What is DevOps?
DevOps is the process or a methodology of using several tools to solve the problems between the ‘Developers’ and ‘Operations’ team, hence the term ‘Dev-Ops.’ This practice allows a single team to manage the entire application development life cycle including development, testing, deployment and monitoring. The ultimate goal of DevOps is to reduce the duration of the system’s development life cycle while providing improved features, fixes and updates constantly in close synchronization with business objectives.
DevOps helps businesses reduce silos while increasing productivity and decreasing application time to market. It enables organizations to keep their Developers, Operators and Customers happy. With DevOps automation, developers have more time to develop code as they receive faster feedback from the operations team. The operations team can also focus more on analytics and metrics of the system, instead of trying to keep the system up all the time. As a result, the operations team gets more robust, tested and stable code from the development team. DevOps allows the testing team to have new versions of applications as required to test without waiting for the development team to push.
DevOps makes lives easier for the end-users as they can get new features and share feedback directly with the developers, which in-turn help in improving the customer experience. As it accelerates the development process, business owners and shareholders can save more on the development costs and make more out of their IT expenditure.
The Life Cycle of DevOps
- Coding: Code development and review, source code management and code merging
- Building: Continuous integration and updating build status
- Testing: Continuous testing to provide quick and timely feedback on business risks
- Packaging: Artefact repository and application pre-deployment staging
- Releasing: Change management, release approvals and release automation
- Configuring: Infrastructure configuration and management, infrastructure as code tools
- Monitoring: Applications performance monitoring and end-user experience
DevOps Tools
There are a lot of tools that enable the smooth working of DevOps. Here are a few major ones:
- Git: Afree, open source version control system that helps handle projects of all sizes
- Docker: Facilitates distribution development through ‘containers’ and automates the deployment
- Selenium: A portable software testing framework for web apps
- Maven: Compiles the source code, runs tests, packages the results into JARs, WARs, etc.
- Jenkins: A continuous integration server that is used for testing
- Nagios: A tool with a rich plugin system, with an open-source monitoring system that helps find and fix issues
- Ansible: Anopen-source IT configuration management & deployment tool
- Puppet: A configuration management platform which allows management of the infrastructure as a code
ACI DevOps has emerged as a credo to bring together two major fields of an organization to help solve the issues faced by its IT team.
