DevOps Software

All About DevOps

DevOps are a collection of ideas that have transformed into a movement and are spreading rapidly across the technical community. Like any popular, new term, people occasionally misinterpret what it is. The proper definition for DevOps is a customary outline to discuss the different areas DevOps covers. To fully understand DevOps, some nuance is required as it is a fairly large concept similar to “Agile” or “Quality.”

The term DevOps developed from the combination of two key related trends. The first one is “agile operations” or “agile infrastructure,” which applies lean and agile approaches to operations work. The second trend expounds upon the understanding of the significance of collaborative value between operations and development staff throughout each stage of the development lifecycle when operating and creating a service, and how vital operations have become in a service-oriented world.

DevOps, for the purpose of this article, doesn’t distinguish between different sysadmin sub-disciplines. “Ops” is a generic term for security professionals, network engineers, DBAs, release engineers, operations staff, system administrators, systems engineers, and a variety of other job titles and occupations. “Dev” is an abbreviation for developers, but it also means “everyone who was involved in developing the product,” which can include QA, product, or other disciplines.

Lean and Agile approaches are two strong affinities DevOps has. An older view of operations focused more on the “Dev” side (the “makers”), while the people who work with the creation after its inception are part of the “Ops” side. There was a realization that any harm done in the industry between the two was being treated as an isolated concern, which is the driving force behind DevOps. For this reason, DevOps can be understood as an extension of Agile, where Agile software development collaborates closely with their developers, product management, customers, and on occasion, QA, to fill the gaps and iterate rapidly towards a better product. In response, DevOps says that how the systems and the application interact as well as how service is delivered is an important part of the value of a proposal to a client. Therefore, the product team must include these issues as a top tier item. In this way, DevOps encompasses Agile ideologies beyond the boundaries of a code to the entire service that’s being delivered.

Deep Dive into DevOps Software

DevOps has a multitude of definitions that mean many things to different people since the discussion around this term covers lots of ground. Some people view DevOps as a collaboration between operations and development. Other people view DevOps as treating your code like it’s infrastructure or as a toolchain approach, an automated approach, a Kanban approach, or a cultural approach. The best in-depth definition for DevOps is to use a method that’s parallel to the definition of a similarly multifaceted word called agile development. According to the Agile Manifesto and Wikipedia, agile development comprises four levels of concern and a fifth term we have added called the tooling level. While DevOps and Agile become a bit too obsessed with tools, it’s unhelpful to pretend they don’t exist at all.

The following paragraphs will break down the definitions of all the different phrases and terms that revolve around Agile and DevOps.

1. Agile values - Agile values are a top-level philosophy embodied in the Agile Manifesto. These include fundamental values that inform agile.

2. Agile principles - Agile principles are strategic approaches that are generally agreed upon to support these values. Part of the Agile Manifesto refers to over a dozen of these specific principles. In order to be agile, you do not have to buy into all of them, but if you don’t subscribe to some of them, you’re likely doing something else.

3. Agile methods - Agile methods are more process-specific applications of the principles. From Scrum, XP, or even your own homebrewed processes, the viewpoint begins to give way to operational playbooks of how people intend to do things in real life. These are only possible implementations - they are not mandatory.

4. Agile practices - Agile practices include highly tactical-specific techniques that lend themselves to be used in connection with agile applications. While none of these are required to be agile, a majority of agile applications have seen value from embracing them. There are specific artifacts a developer needs to accomplish their work including CI, backlogs, planning poker, and standups.

5. Agile tools - Agile tools are specific procedural applications used by teams to simplify their work such as planningpoker.com or JIRA Agile (Greenhopper).

6. DevOps values - Most of the essential DevOps values are captured effectively in the Agile Manifesto with a slight revision to focus on the overall software or service being delivered to the customer instead of only “working software.”

7. DevOps principles - While there isn’t an agreed upon list, there are many attempts which are widely accepted including James Turnbull providing his own definition and John Willis inventing “CAMS.” One commonly used DevOps principle is “infrastructure as code.” At an abstract level, DevOps is broadening Agile’s ideologies to include operations and systems rather than stopping its concerns during code check-in.

8. DevOps methods - Some methods are the same here. For instance, you can use Kanban and Scrum with operations that have more focus on incorporating ops with dev, product, and QA in the product teams. Another method includes operating the Visible Ops-style change control while utilizing the Incident Command System for responding to incidents. The list of approaches continues to grow. An approach that might be more thoughtful would be to monitor an area where common methods haven’t been well defined.

9. DevOps practices - These are specific methods that are used as part of executing the above processes and concepts. Continuous deployment and integration put your developers on call by giving them a pager and by using monitoring, metrics, and management schemes which are an effective approach to tooling. Cloud computing and virtualization are common practices used in the modern world of infrastructure to accelerate change.

10. DevOps tools - DevOps tools would be used in the commission of the principles we’ve already discussed. An explosion of tools have been released in the DevOps world such as teamcity, travis, and jenkins as well as configuration management (including puppet, chef, ansible, and cfengine), orchestration (including zookeeper, noah, and mesos), monitoring, containerization, and virtualization (including AWS, OpenStack, vagrant, and docker), and more. It’s incorrect to believe that any tool is a “DevOps tool” in the sense that it will automatically bring you DevOps, but there are a variety of specific tools in development with the goal of simplifying the above practices, methods, and principles. A universal understanding of DevOps should incorporate this layer.

As you can clearly see, DevOps is difficult to define just like Agile. In order to be a successful DevOps or Agile practitioner, you need to understand everything that goes into it and what certain DevOps applications might have or not have. The main objective DevOps is hoping to bring to Agile is the practice and understanding that software isn’t complete until it’s delivered successfully to a user and meets their expectations as far as pace of change, performance, and availability are concerned.

Three key practice areas that are normally discussed with regards to DevOps include size reliability engineering which operates your systems as well as monitoring and orchestration and is also designed for operability, continuous delivery which builds, tests, and deploys all of your apps in a fast, automated fashion, and infrastructure automation which creates app deployments, OS configurations, and systems as code.

More than just a singular solution, DevOps overarches philosophy to employ many software systems. This concept has bridged the gap between development and operations. Through the use of agile procedures, both teams can work together to deliver better services and applications to customers and optimize productivity. DevOps has a cross-departmental nature which requires lots of tools from various software categories. The products included in the Continuous Delivery category as well as other subcategories including Configuration Management, Build Automation, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Deployment contribute to all of DevOps’ practices on the development side of things. These tools let developers release codes for their projects anytime, which makes improving apps, testing, and building an uninterrupted process. Source code management systems offer most of the same benefits as CD tools and are helping to uncover security risks and errors in the original versions of codes. Processes will become more efficient when a service or app is managed or developed. Team collaboration tools guarantee that this type of efficiency can be employed to provide open links of communication between each department that utilizes a DevOps strategy.

Popular DevOps Software Categories

Continuous Delivery

A somewhat debated and confusing term, continuous delivery is often described as an effective approach to software production. This concept includes integration and continuous delivery, paired with configuration management and build automation. The process is slightly more specific than DevOps because it functions around a series of releases, approval, and tests. Whenever a change is made, a test is run once a build takes place. The results of the tests are then returned to the development team to be approved or denied. Using uninterrupted integration tools, changes can either be instantly released or held off until a specific time. Businesses use these tools as well as this method to create a continuous user experience when updating software products and applications.

Continuous Deployment

Some of the largest, most dynamic tools included in this category are continuous deployment tools. This category provides tools to complete every step of the continuous delivery process. These tools also allow teams to instantly deploy after a change is made instead of waiting for multiple updates to take place and deploying them together as a group. The entire process is automated, but not meant for teams who require stringent analytics on deployment efficiency. Continuous deployment tools are for businesses that want continuously updated software.

Continuous Integration

Continuous integration tools are the tools that enable this development practice to allow individuals and development teams to check out parts of code from a repository. The code can be updated, changed, or edited but is eventually verified and integrated into the application, reducing the need for teams to set aside time for lengthy, bulky software updates and integrations. This process involves multiple developers to ensure swift and significant changes that can be integrated quickly into applications.

Build Automation

The tools featured in build automation include a development process that’s similar to continuous integration tools, but their capacities are often limited to only before updates are integrated into an application. The same process will be followed by developers. Code will still be gathered, built, and tested, and changes will still require approval. However, these products will not use the same kind of trigger that put changes into place automatically. The products will only perform the first step in the automation of the continuous delivery process.

Configuration Management

Otherwise called IT automation, configuration management reduces burdens placed on development teams to guarantee that the current state of an application is the one that was intended. These tools present information about the application’s current performance and state as well as document historical records of changes that were made during the delivery process. Configuration management more-or-less means version management and the performance control of benefits applications.