What is DevOps?
DevOps is about breaking down silos between traditionally separate development and operations teams. Through continuous integration, deployment, and practices like Infrastructure as Code, it accelerates product development, ensuring quality and responsive change management. Adopting DevOps isn't just about new tools; it's a mindset shift towards continuous improvement and teamwork.
DevOps explained
DevOps, short for "development" and "operations," is a way of thinking in the software development and cloud computing industry. It integrates and automates the work of software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to improve and shorten the systems development life cycle.
The DevOps process is characterised by agility and automation, with each phase focusing on closing the loop between development and operations.
DevOps is about removing the barriers between two traditionally siloed teams, development and operations, and optimising both the productivity of developers and the reliability of operations. When implemented correctly, an agile DevOps process results in better products, happier customers, and healthier bottom lines.
What is a DevOps platform?
A DevOps platform is a set of tools, processes, and practices designed to enable collaboration, automation, and integration between development and operations teams. It provides a centralised platform for managing the entire software development lifecycle, from planning and coding to testing and deployment.
DevOps platforms are characterised by their ability to integrate various capabilities that span the software development life cycle (SDLC). These capabilities include product version control, continuous integration, test automation, continuous deployment, release orchestration, automating security and compliance policies, monitoring, and observability.
A DevOps platform aims to develop, secure, and operate software in a single application. This unified approach allows everyone involved in the software development process to collaborate effectively, providing a single source of truth and streamlining the technical development process.
How does DevOps work?
The DevOps process flow typically includes the following stages:
Planning:
This involves understanding the needs of customers and creating products or services that meet those needs. Teams should not 'build in a bubble', but should have a holistic understanding of the product, from creation to implementation.
Release and deployment:
The Ops team takes care of the release, deployment, and management of the software in production. This includes installation, configuration, and changes of infrastructure, database, and resource management, as well as security testing. Ops teams must aim to do so in an agile manner – with minimal delays.
Coding and building:
Developers are responsible for coding and building the software. This stage involves writing code, checking it into a version control system, and building executables.
Operations:
IT admins manage software during production. Tools such as Ansible and Puppet provide the necessary management and data collection capabilities, as well as operational views into production applications.
Testing:
Automated testing is a key principle of DevOps. It ensures that any changes made to the code do not break the application.
Monitoring and feedback:
Development and operations teams should continually monitor their production applications. Feedback from this monitoring is used to inform future development work.
Benefits of DevOps
Subscribing to the DevOps philosophy brings a multitude of benefits that can transform the way organisations develop and deliver software, making the process far more agile. At the heart of DevOps is the enhancement of collaboration between development and operations teams.
This cultural shift promotes shared responsibility, transparency, and faster feedback, which leads to better communication and a more cohesive working environment.
By breaking down the traditional silos, teams can work together more effectively, resulting in a more streamlined and efficient workflow. This collaborative approach not only improves the internal dynamics of a team but also significantly speeds up the delivery of solutions, enabling organisations to respond more swiftly to market demands and customer needs. The adoption of DevOps practices such as continuous integration and deployment facilitates a more agile and responsive development process.
It allows for the frequent and reliable release of software – again pointing to the theme of agility – which is crucial in today's fast-paced digital landscape. Automated testing and the incremental release of software enhance quality control, ensuring that each deployment is as reliable as possible, thereby reducing the risk of bugs and defects.
This focus on quality and reliability translates into improved customer satisfaction, as end-users benefit from better products and services delivered on a more consistent basis. Moreover, the efficiency gains and reduced risks associated with DevOps lead to cost savings, as the approach helps to minimise production and administration expenses.
For professionals within the industry, DevOps offers opportunities for career growth by broadening their skill sets to include system administration, automation, and cloud technologies, making them more versatile and valuable in the job market.
Lastly, the emphasis on innovation and resilience ensures that organisations are better equipped to adapt to changes, drive business results, and recover quickly from any incidents or outages. Transitioning to DevOps, however, is not just about adopting new tools or processes; it requires a fundamental change in culture and mindset to fully realise its potential benefits
How DevOps accelerates your product development
Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration (CI) is an agile method where developers frequently merge code changes into a shared repository. This practice allows for smaller, manageable code changes, which are easier to handle and have fewer issues that may need to be repaired at a later date.
Automated builds and tests are part of this process, enabling developers to commit changes with confidence. Early automated testing greatly reduces the number of defects that make their way to production, enhancing the overall quality of the product. This process also improves team communication, testing quality, and overall efficiency.
Continuous deployment
Continuous Deployment (CD) is another part of the agile toolbox and a critical phase of the DevOps process. It involves the automatic deployment of all changes that pass the automated testing phase to production. This practice allows for faster software delivery, quicker feedback, reduced risk, and improved responsibility. CD enables organisations to respond to market demands for high-quality solutions in a lesser amount of time. It also increases customer feedback and satisfaction, leading to increased innovation.
Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a practice of managing and provisioning computer data centres through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. IaC can automate all processes and changes, saving time and making teams more productive.
It treats infrastructure elements, such as servers, applications, and networks, as software components that can be managed and versioned in a source control system. This practice leads to consistent configurations, decreased risk, stronger security, faster recovery, and improved accountability.
Microservices
Microservices is an architecture that structures applications as a collection of services that are easily maintainable and testable, loosely coupled, deployable independently, and organised around business capabilities.
This approach allows for the development of complex products by breaking them down into smaller, manageable parts that can be worked on concurrently by different teams. It also enables continuous delivery and deployment of large, complex applications.
Logs and Monitoring
DevOps also emphasises the importance of logs and monitoring. These practices provide visibility into the application's operational status, helping to identify and resolve issues quickly. They also support decision-making processes with data-driven insights.
Monitoring tools can track various metrics, such as application performance, user behaviour, and business metrics, providing a comprehensive view of the product's health and performance. In conclusion, the DevOps philosophy, with its practices like Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, Infrastructure as Code, Microservices, and Logs and Monitoring, can significantly enhance product development. It promotes faster delivery, improved collaboration, higher product quality, and a more responsive approach to changes.
How to adopt DevOps
DevOps is about processes – and about principles. The steps in the process of adopting DevOps in an organisation would look roughly like this:
Take a DevOps mindset
Adopting a DevOps mindset is the first and most crucial step. This mindset involves continuous learning, improvement, and collaboration between teams. It involves breaking down traditional silos and fostering a culture of shared responsibility and transparency. The DevOps mindset promotes resilience, the ability to adapt to changes without significant delays. It's important to note that the success of DevOps implementation largely depends on people and culture, not just tools and automation.
Recognize infrastructure requirements
Understanding the infrastructure requirements is crucial. This involves assessing the current state of the infrastructure and identifying gaps. Then, select the right set of tools that align with your organisational goals. Embrace cloud platforms like AWS or Azure for scalable and on-demand resources. Incorporate Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices to make provisioning repeatable and consistent.
Create a DevOps strategy
Develop a clear DevOps strategy that outlines the goals, roles, responsibilities, and processes. This strategy should focus on supporting the continuous release of production-ready processes and enabling the rest of the team to work efficiently. The strategy should be tailored to the business and supervised by the program manager or IT director.
Choose the right DevOps tools
Selecting the right tools is essential for implementing DevOps practices. These tools should support continuous integration, continuous deployment, infrastructure as code, microservices, and logs and monitoring. Consider factors such as integration with other systems and tools, compatibility with a range of platforms, customization capabilities, community and client support, performance, scaling capabilities, compatibility with cloud platforms, and price.
Increase test automation and align QA with development
Increasing test automation and aligning Quality Assurance (QA) with development is a key aspect of DevOps. This helps in the early detection of defects, reducing the number of issues that make it to production. It's important to understand the collaboration and shared tools strategy for the Dev, QA, and infrastructure automation teams.
Application containerization
Containerization of applications is a rapidly evolving technology that makes apps easily executable and lightweight. It's a crucial part of the DevOps process. Containerisation allows for more efficient, rapid, and reliable software delivery from concept to customer.
Focus on iterative adoption
DevOps adoption should be iterative, starting small and gradually expanding to other parts of the organisation. This allows for learning and adjustments along the way. It's important to take one step at a time and not to create the entire CI/CD pipeline from the ground up.
The first step in this process is to select a small component or a pilot application that is currently in production. This component should ideally have a simple code base with few dependencies and minimal infrastructure. This initial step serves as a proving ground where the team can gain experience in implementing DevOps practices.
As the organisation gains confidence and sees the benefits of implementing DevOps on a small scale, it can then start to expand these practices to larger and more complex projects. This expansion should be done in a way that the process and workflow can be repeated by multiple teams.
Overcome the 'Ops vs. Dev' mindset
Overcoming the 'Ops vs. Dev' mindset is a major challenge in DevOps adoption. It's important to encourage and enable Dev, Ops, and other teams to work together, thus breaking down barriers between silos. The 'Ops vs. Dev' mindset is characterised by several key aspects:
Adopting DevOps requires a significant cultural shift within an organisation. This can be met with resistance, especially if team members are comfortable with the existing workflows and processes. Traditional siloed structures often result in minimal communication and collaboration between different teams. For DevOps to succeed, these barriers must be eliminated.
To overcome these challenges, organisations need to foster a culture of collaboration and communication, redefine roles and processes, and invest in the right technologies and tools. It's also crucial to align the goals of the development and operations teams and to promote a shared understanding of these goals.
Executive leadership’s support
Support from executive leadership or top management is critical as DevOps is a culture transformation. The vision for DevOps culture transformation helps business units to understand the priority. A company’s IT director is critical in introducing the DevOps initiative.
DevOps products and integrations
OVHcloud's Public Cloud is built on industry-standard technology, ensuring native compatibility between systems and efficient data imports and exports in cloud storage. It supports a wide array of tools directly configurable for the Public Cloud, enabling users to leverage the entire DevOps ecosystem. Notable tools include Terraform and Ansible, and OVHcloud resources can be used for software factories like Jenkins.
The Public Cloud service is based on the principles of SMART: Simple, Multi-local, Accessible, Reversible, and Transparent. It is designed to be user-friendly, globally available, affordable with no hidden costs, open and interoperable due to the use of industry-standard technologies, and committed to clear communication and predictable pricing.
The foundation of OVHcloud's Public Cloud is OpenStack, and OVHcloud is an active sponsor of the wider open-source community. They provide infrastructure for OpenStack’s CI/CD and contribute to the code. OVHcloud is one of OpenStack’s most important operators.
OVHcloud and DevOps
Managed Kubernetes Service
Orchestrate your containerised applications with a CNCF-certified Kubernetes cluster
Storage Optimized
Get ultra-fast IOPS, with NVMe drives specially designed for databases and big data applications
Managed Private Registry
Manage a repository for your software building blocks, in the form of Docker images or Helm charts
