DevOps

Siloed software development and IT operations have historically slowed down developers and delayed the release of new applications and features. Simultaneously, the demand for accelerated software delivery and better end-user experiences has risen to unprecedented levels.

The growing need to transform traditional development processes into highly automated, unified, and collaborative environments prompted a new agile development methodology: DevOps.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a development approach that aims to expedite the software delivery pipeline. DevOps does so by breaking down silos between software development and IT operations and integrating and automating processes, tools, and workflows.

DevOps creates stronger ties and improved collaboration for the development team. This cultivates a more collaborative development culture, where multiple teams work in harmony to ensure the continuous delivery of new software features.

What is DevOps besides that? One of the major growth areas in IT. Research suggests that by 2028 the total value of the DevOps market will top out at $25.5 billion. That shows a compound annual growth since 2023 of nearly 20%. DevOps provides development teams the agility and flexibility to meet evolving business needs, customer expectations, and market trends securely and economically.

What are the main components and characteristics of DevOps?

DevOps isn’t a singular technology or practice. It’s a collection of tools, practices, and personnel united by an overarching philosophy.

Here are some of the most critical DevOps best practices:

• Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): The core of DevOps culture. CI involves automating the process of scripting code changes into a common repository. CD ensures that those new code changes go straight through to production.

• Infrastructure as code (IaC) involves provisioning critical development infrastructure in machine-readable formats instead of physical or manual processes.

• Rapid feedback loops: Since DevOps is about streamlining collaboration between application development and operations teams, rapid feedback loops are vital. They ensure that feedback on code changes and new iterations is exchanged in a flash as an integral step of the DevOps lifecycle.

• Microservices architecture: DevOps breaks down traditional monolithic architecture into a more loosely coupled and granular microservices model. Microservices connect via APIs and can be quickly and independently deployed.

• Cloud computing: Provides DevOps with a robust and dynamic base to operate from. By using the cloud’s scalability and speed, DevOps teams can easily provision new infrastructure, set up CI/CD pipelines, and automate development workflows.

• Around-the-clock monitoring and logging: To ensure constant and proactive optimization of development pipelines, DevOps elevates the role of monitoring and logging. By surveilling development environments 24/7, DevOps teams can address issues and inefficiencies early.

• Unified and collaborative processes Siloed processes and suboptimal collaboration models. DevOps integrates critical processes and teams across software development and IT operations with standard toolchains, a common language, and an overarching philosophy.

What are the primary benefits of DevOps?

The following are some of the biggest advantages that DevOps provides:

• Increased agility: DevOps gives development teams the agility to stay ahead of the curve, ensuring quick and efficient development and deployment.

• Robust and integrated security: Also called DevSecOps, DevOps offers a different way of introducing security across the development lifecycle. Instead of finding and fixing bugs in the latter half of an application lifecycle, DevOps integrates and automates security as early as possible, which is known as shift-left security.

• Streamlined communication and collaboration: DevOps fixes bottleneck-heavy workflows, establishes strong communication channels, and introduces numerous collaborative tools.

• Enhanced scalability is thanks to DevOps’ fine-tuned CI/CD pipelines and robust underlying cloud platforms. These ensure that teams can effectively handle fluctuating workloads without performance drops. This includes provisioning higher volumes of development infrastructure and optimizing resource usage to meet growing demands without depleting the budget.

• Faster application delivery: DevOps’ main selling point is providing end users with quicker access to new software and features. By automating and streamlining the entire software delivery pipeline, DevOps ensures that teams can rapidly develop and deploy new software or iterations.

• Improved resilience and reliability: Using constant monitoring and logging, advanced automation mechanisms, and strong feedback loops, DevOps strengthens the entire development ecosystem. This means that issues are resolved faster, vulnerabilities don’t mature into disasters, and inefficiencies are ironed out before end users notice.

What is a DevOps engineer?

A DevOps engineer is a software engineer with skills and expertise across various IT operations. Using various toolchains and processes, DevOps engineers transform the theory of DevOps methodology into practice.

Roles and responsibilities in DevOps engineering

Like DevOps methodology itself, DevOps engineering has a wide scope:

• Build, deploy, and manage CI/CD pipelines
• Ensure optimal configurations across the entire software development lifecycle
• Integrate and automate security tools and capabilities
• Establish strong collaboration and communication channels and feedback loops
• Automate repetitive and manual development tasks
• Monitor development environments and pipelines and log discoveries
• Evaluate the performance of development pipelines, diagnose inefficiencies, and strategize improvements
• Remediate incidents across application development lifecycles
• Maintain thorough documentation for audits, forensics, and intelligence sharing

What are DevOps tools?

To enforce these tenets, DevOps teams need cutting-edge DevOps tools. While different teams may employ a different DevOps toolchain, the following categories of DevOps tools are ubiquitous.

DevOps automation tools

DevOps automation tools primarily address laggard manual development processes. Across the entire application lifecycle, these tools automate and orchestrate critical activities, including integrating, validating, and deploying code.

Examples: Quali Torque and Quali CloudShell

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools

IaC tools help DevOps teams manage, version control, and provision resources via code. They provide an efficient way to distribute critical development infrastructure in machine-readable formats, which results in a faster software delivery pipeline.

Examples: Terraform and OpenTofu

CI/CD tools

CI/CD tools are essential components of a DevOps stack. They help DevOps teams automate the validation of incremental code changes, the integration of new code iterations into codebases, and deployment to production environments.

Example: Jenkins

Version control systems

Version control systems help DevOps teams stay on top of code changes. With these tools, multiple teams can work together, create pull requests, and merge or modify code. They ensure that high-octane cross-team collaboration doesn’t result in congestion and chaos. Version control tools also keep an extensive activity log to track changes so, if needed, DevOps teams can restore a previous version of the code.

Examples: GitHub and GitLab

Configuration management tools

An application lifecycle involves critical IT infrastructure, such as databases, networks, servers, and a plethora of applications. DevOps teams use configuration management tools to maintain configuration settings across these resources. These tools help DevOps teams simplify and standardize configurations, mitigating configuration drift, compliance failures, and scalability challenges.

Examples: Ansible and Terraform

Containerization tools

With containerization tools, DevOps teams can package applications in isolated runtime environments known as containers. Containerized applications are invaluable because they offer higher flexibility and scalability. The primary benefit of containerization tools is that DevOps teams can easily workshop work-in-progress applications in different environments.

Examples: Kubernetes and Docker

Monitoring and logging platforms

To proactively optimize environments, DevOps  teams need real-time and actionable insights into the software delivery pipeline. Monitoring and logging platforms gather and analyze information from development environments and provide DevOps teams with key insights via different dashboards and widgets.

Examples: Grafane and Prometheus

Automation testing tools

Manually testing code is the antithesis of DevOps. Automation testing tools automatically and continuously check new iterations of code for vulnerabilities and bugs, ensuring rapidity and that hidden issues don’t seep into production environments.

Examples: Selenium, JUnit, and test.ai

Security tools

To integrate security mechanisms across the application lifecycle, DevOps teams need strong security tools, such as container and IaC security tools, static application security testing (SAST), and dynamic application security testing (DAST). These help DevOps teams stay on top of security threats from design to deployment.

Examples: SonarQube, OWASP ZAP, and Kibana

Site reliability engineer vs. DevOps engineer

What’s the difference between the roles of site reliability engineer vs. DevOps engineer? Let’s take a look at how the two roles compare in this site reliability engineer vs. DevOps engineer table:

Platform engineering vs. DevOps engineering

Platform engineering is another important field that’s closely related to DevOps.

Here are the key differences between platform engineering vs. DevOps engineering.

How to implement DevOps best practices: A step-by-step guide

Below are a few simple steps to kickstart DevOps initiatives.

1. Assess the current state of your development environments

To optimize development environments, it’s important to take a look at existing development infrastructure, resources, practices, and personnel. Evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of current development lifecycles can help create the ideal DevOps roadmap.

2. Develop a DevOps strategy

Create a DevOps strategy that’s based on improved collaboration and communication between your developers and operations team members. CI/CD, automation, shorter feedback loops, and proactive optimization should be at the center of this strategy.

3. Containerize applications

Package applications into lightweight and isolated containers with their own supplementary resources, libraries, and configuration settings. Containerizing applications helps make development scalable and agile, two of DevOps’ cornerstones. It also means that, even without dependencies, developers can work on applications across diverse environments.

4. Establish automation-driven CI/CD pipelines

Create robust CI/CD pipelines. Automate the integration of new iterations of code into a common codebase and the deployment of validated code into production. Integrating development infrastructure with various CI/CD tools is important in this stage.

5. Introduce testing automation

Add automated testing processes to CI/CD pipelines so developers can continuously test and validate code across the software lifecycle. This helps identify bugs and issues before they enter production or reach the end user.

6. Continuously monitor and evaluate

DevOps implementation isn’t a one-time event. To ensure proactive optimization of software delivery pipelines, it’s important to monitor environments and CI/CD pipelines to find inefficiencies, bottlenecks, configuration sprawl, code bugs, and security issues. Keep software delivery pipelines robust and updated by monitoring and logging DevOps activities and using the right metrics and KPIs.

Summary

Agile methodologies like DevOps can radically transform development environments and make developers more productive. However, it’s important to remember that DevOps is a methodology, not a technology. Therefore, developers need robust infrastructure orchestration and automation platforms like Quali Torque and CloudShell to power DevOps environments.

Quali Torque ensures that DevOps teams have immediate self-service access to critical development infrastructure and resources. Quali CloudShell distills critical development infrastructure into no/low code drag-and-drop infrastructure assets. Together, they can make DevOps teams more efficient than ever before.