DEVOPS

 

The term DevOps becoming more and more popular in the world of Software Development. DevOps is the combination of 2 words, Development and Operation. It promotes collaboration and coordination between the Software Developing team and It Operations team to increase speed, efficiency, and quality of software development and delivery.

DevOps culture influences each phase of the application’s life cycle, it also complies with visibility, and each team must share their process priorities, and concerns with each other to achieve business goals faster. DevOps emphasizes continuous improvement and the use of automation to streamline processes. Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) are two of the most important practices in DevOps.

Importance of DevOps

Speed:DevOps practices enable organizations to deliver new features and functionality to customers more quickly, reducing the time taken in the entire software development and maintenance process because of automation.

Increased agility:DevOps helps organizations respond to changes in the market and respond to customer needs more quickly, allowing them to pivot and adjust their strategies and offerings as required.

More collaboration: DevOps breaks down the wall between development, operations, and other teams, fostering collaboration and communication across the organization.

Enhanced quality: DevOps practices such as continuous integration, automated testing, and continuous delivery help to ensure that software is of high quality and meets customer requirements.

Improved efficiency: DevOps automates many of the manual tasks involved in software delivery, reducing errors and freeing up resources for more strategic work.

DevOps Pipeline

DevOps pipeline is a set of automated processes and tools that allows developing and operations teams to work together to build and deploy code to a production environment. The DevOps pipeline need not be required to same, it is by organization based on the requirement. A typical DevOps pipeline includes building Continuous Integration, Automation Testing, Validation, Reporting, and Deploying to Production. It may also include one or more manual gates that require human intervention before the code is allowed to process.

DevOps Life Cycle

DevOps also follows agile Methodology, in addition, the DevOps process is practiced by the development team and operational engineers together from the beginning to the final stage of the product. DevOps Lifecycle has seven phases. Let's look into each phase separately.

Continuous Development

This is the 1st phase of the DevOps Life Cycle. This phase involves planning and developing the code of the application. The development process is broken down into smaller development cycles and Devs start to code for the application. This phase generates the vision of the application and allows developers to fully understand the project.

Continuous Integration

After developers made the required updates in their code, the changes will be continuously integrated into the source code in this phase. This can be done with CI tools such as Jenkins. Because of Continuous Integration in Source Code, Devs can quickly spot problems (if any) in the early stages and quickly resolve them. This phase also includes unit testing, integration testing, code reviewing, and packaging. The test server receives this build after that.

Continuous Testing

In this phase, QA will check the functionality of the application and hunt for bugs in newly deployed changes. QA uses automation testing tools such as Playwright, Selenium, JUnit, and TestNG for constant Automation testing. These tools allow testers to test multiple codes in parallel to ensure there are no bugs and flaws in the functionality. To simulate the testing environment, Docker Containers can be used.

The entire testing can be automated with the help of CI tools Jenkins. Automating the testing process can save lots of time and effort in executing each and every test cases manually. The automation test execution can be scheduled in Jenkins or the execution can be automated after every deployment in Jenkins.

Continuous Monitoring

In this phase, the application’s performance, API responses, stability of front end and back end, networks, server’s health of production systems including servers and database were monitored consistently. During this phase, Operation teams will inform Developing and testing teams about the new issue and the system errors, such as the server not being reachable and low memory, and these will be fixed.

Continuous Feedback

The success of the DevOps process comes only because it allows continuous improvement. The application development is consistently improved by analysing the feedback from the operation teams. This Feedback process between the operations and development teams will help the discuss the issues such as what delays the deployment timeline and what makes the software hard to maintain.

Continuous Deployment

This phase involves deploying the new code change automatically in production after successful testing. The continuous Deployment process aims to reduce the time and effort required to release new software updates by automating the entire deployment process. It helps organizations to release new features with confidence as each change is automatically tested and validated before being deployed to production. 

Continuous Operations

This phase is the extension of several key activities such as Continuous Monitoring, Improvement, Testing, and Deployment. It ensures the aims to reduce the time and effort required to release new software updates by automating the entire deployment process. This phase helps organizations to ensure the production system is reliable, stable and meets the required service level

DevOps Tools

There are various tools used to Implement various stages of DevOps life cycle. Here is some of the Common tools used in DevOps.

Jenkins

Jenkins is the most popular automation server used for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).

Git

Git is an open-source distributed version control system used for managing source code and other digital assets. It helps to collaborate and manage source code changes effectively. 

Docker

Docker allows building, shipping, and running distributed applications on multiple systems. It enables the packaging and deployment of applications in isolated containers.

Ansible

Ansible is an open-source tool that has functions such as Software provisioning, Configuration Management, and Application Deployment.

Nagios

Nagios is used for monitoring the performance of IT infrastructure, including servers, applications, network devices, and services.

Puppet

Puppet is a configuration management tool used for automating the management of IT infrastructure.

Saltstack

SaltStack, also known as Salt, is an open-source configuration management and orchestration tool used for automating the management of IT infrastructure at scale.

Splunk

Splunk is a software platform used for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated big data in real time.

Selenium

Selenium is one of the essential automation testing frameworks for web applications. It allows developers and testers to write automated scripts in various programming languages, such as Java, Python, and C#, to perform functional and regression testing of web applications across different browsers and platforms.

Conclusion

DevOps is all about integrating Development Team and IT Operation team. It emphasizes collaboration, communication, and automation, which leads to the delivery of high-quality software products and services.