Written By: Daniel Kulvicki, Solutions Director at Calavista
In the last decade, we have seen significant shifts in software development operations. One of these shifts is the evolution of DevOps, which came to play in 2008/9. Even as organizations continue to adopt the practice, DevOps is still considered an extra when it needs to be a fundamental. In this article, we are going to explore DevOps and why every organization should adopt it.
- What is DevOps?
- How does DevOps work?
- Calavista Tenets of DevOps
What is DevOps?
For years, developers and most system operations teams worked separately. If you have ever worked in a software development company, you would know that these departments don’t always agree. And this can always lead to fatal disagreements that delay the development and productivity of an organization.
DevOps is a term used to describe the collaborative effort between developers and the IT operations team to improve the application development and release process. DevOps is derived from ‘Developers’ and ‘Operations.’ It involves agile development methodology and Enterprise Service Management (ESM).
Agile development is a software development approach that focuses on collaboration between cross-functional teams to enhance rapid releases. This approach aims to help the development teams keep up with the fast-evolving market dynamics in software development. Like DevOps, changes in the agile development processes are incorporated continuously to produce a usable version of the application faster without compromising the quality of the output.
DevOps uses agile strategies, including collaboration and automation. However, it also includes the operations team who manage the application in production.
ESM applies IT system management such as system monitoring, automation, and configuration to improve performance, efficiency, and service delivery. This is the practice that brings the operations team to DevOps.
The developers would produce the code and hand it over to the operations team in the traditional software development process. The IT operators would generate or build the application from the code then proceed to test and production. In case of errors or when a client requests changes, the application would go back to the developers, and the cycle would go on.
DevOps changed all this through various practices, including Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). Continuous Integration allows developers to submit their code into a shared repository several times a day and throughout development. It is a cost-effective way to identify bugs via automation tools. This increases efficiency since the developers will fix the bugs at the earliest chance. However, it is essential to note that CI does not get rid of the bugs. Instead, it is a principle that aids developers in identifying bugs so they can fix them in a timely manner.
Continuous Delivery makes app or software deployment a lot more predictable. It ensures that the code remains in a deployable state even as developers work to introduce new features or make configuration changes. As with CI, Continuous Delivery enhances frequent app releases with limited instability and security issues. Thus, Continuous Delivery increases not only efficiency but also the quality of the application/software.
CI/CD go hand in hand. They allow developers to make code changes frequently and release them to the operations and quality assurance teams. Together, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery increase the rate of production and the quality of applications.
In DevOps, the team works together from development to deployment. This enables organizations to work on multiple projects simultaneously to produce high-quality applications and software.
How does DevOps work?
Developers and system operators differ on a lot of things. But, at the same time, the two teams must work together to successfully deliver software development changes to the end-user (developers write code, and operations gets the code to the end-user). Remember, customer satisfaction is the backbone of any software development organization and this is where DevOps comes in. While it’s not easy, bringing both teams together will ease the development and rollout processes.
Let me explain how DevOps works with an example.
If we look at a typical software development team working on an application. The team includes software developers, software testers, DevOps engineer(s), and some other roles like scrum master and business analysts. The software developers write new code and make changes to existing code. The software testers ensure the code works as designed – often, this will include automated tests. The DevOps engineers make sure everything comes together and automates as much as possible. The DevOps engineers typically stand up the development tools and environments, implement a process to “build” the code that typically includes the automated testing, and provide metrics on the development process and the application. The primary goal is to produce an app that is stable and secure efficiently, and the DevOps engineers are a critical part of this team.
Software development can be challenging, especially because clients demand changes all the time. However, DevOps teams implement these changes faster through constant collaboration, communication, and automation.
At Calavista, we like to break DevOps into 6 different tenets. This helps identify various areas of focus for our clients.
Calavista Tenets of DevOps
If your company is about to adopt DevOps or simply looking for ways to improve your current development processes, you will need a solid strategy. It will involve bringing cross-functional teams together, which also means changing the work culture. So, how do you go about it? This section highlights the fundamental principles of DevOps.
When we talk about DevOps, we like to break it down into 6 key areas crucial to the success of your company’s development – deployment processes.
- Collaboration
- Automation
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Testing / Test Automation
- Continuous Delivery / Continuous Deployment
- Continuous Monitoring
As with other many changes, adopting DevOps will require you to develop a repeatable set of steps for the team. What goes first, and what comes second? Your DevOps team needs chronological steps so they can work together.
For instance, in a typical situation, a simple DevOps pipeline would look like this:
Step 1: Developers write the code
Step 2: Both engineers and IT operators compile the code and check for errors
Step 3: The operation team enables testing and quality assurance to validate and verify the code
Step 4: Deployment – The code is moved to a staging and/or production environment
However, different organizations will have other DevOps pipelines. Therefore, it is essential to define these functions for DevOps methodology to succeed. This must also include a brief description of the automation tools you will use to develop and deploy an application.
Defining your DevOps pipeline allows smooth collaboration between the teams through the production cycle.
Collaboration
DevOps is built on the principles of collaboration between developers, testers, and system operators. The relationship between these teams will determine your production efficiency. Furthermore, the collaboration goes beyond this core team into your business stakeholders and others to ensure the team is properly building what is needed by the end users following an agile methodology. Helping everyone work together effectively will help you deliver great products.
This means that you might have to change your company culture. DevOps will not work for your organization if your developers and IT team don’t work collaboratively. Remember that it is a strategy that involves constant changes that must be validated in real-time.
DevOps is not only a developers-IT team affair. The stakeholders and management must also join the team so that everyone is on the same page. It is beneficial to both the organization and the team at large.
Good collaboration across the development and operations team and the broader organization is crucial to delivering outstanding software products.
Automation
Successful DevOps implementation relies heavily on automation. Therefore, it is essential to use the right test automation frameworks established in the right tool to automate extensive development and deployment pipeline sections. Automation is a combination of tools and scripting to implement a cohesive and efficient development environment and can include any part of the development, testing, and operations activities, including onboarding.
So, what is Automation in DevOps? It is the use of advanced tools to perform tasks that require minimal human intervention. However, automation does not get rid of the human functions in DevOps. Instead, it enhances the entire DevOps pipeline to allow quick releases. We will outline the benefits of automation in DevOps. But, first, let’s define the DevOps process that can be automated.
DevOps Processes to Automate
Ideally, you can automate all the processes of DevOps, but you usually do not have the time to automate everything. Your automation infrastructure will vary from that of another company based on your specific requirements. When thinking about automation, we recommend prioritizing the following processes:
- CI/CD
- Testing
- Continuous Monitoring
DevOps automation begins with code generation. Next, multiple developers will submit their code into the source code repository, requiring Continuous Integration (CI). At this stage, your automation tool should detect bugs and any inconsistencies in the code. This makes it easy for developers to fix the bugs as soon as the system identifies them. Automation also enhances Continuous Delivery (CD) by allowing frequent configuration of new features and other changes to the code. As a result, it is easier to keep the code in a deployable condition at all stages.
Accurate testing is crucial to software development. Automation tools run testing automatically and as frequently as the developers check the code into the repository. With automation, code testing runs throughout the software development cycles. Therefore, it is less likely for a company to release unstable or erroneous applications using automation.
We will look at these processes in the following sections of this article. All in all, automation is one of the crucial principles of DevOps. Below are some of the benefits of automation in DevOps:
- Reliability of the app
- Accuracy during code generation
- Enhances collaboration between the teams
- Automation also reduces the cost of production by reducing the number of staff needed for development, testing, and deployment
- It improves the overall quality of the app
Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration enables developers to submit and merge their individually written/modified code into the shared main code branch. For instance, once the product road map is laid out, code generation starts. In most cases, developers will begin with the most critical parts of the source code. Therefore, Continuous Integration requires that individual developers submit and merge their code into a shared repository several times a day.
These changes go through automated testing to identify bugs. Developers will fix any detected bugs as soon as possible to keep the code ready for the main codebase. This allows for smooth workflow and consistency through regular adjustments to the code to meet the set validation criteria. Continuous Integration is also an essential step towards Continuous Delivery, a process that we shall focus on later.
Why is CI so significant in DevOps?
DevOps is based on a set of strategies that fuel software development processes for speedy and incremental release. Continuous Integration allows multiple developers to write and merge their code into a shared codebase. This builds transparency and accuracy throughout the development lifecycle. It ensures that everyone is on the same page during the code generation stage of software development. It also promotes collaboration between the involved departments in an organization.
Through automated testing, Continuous Integration enhances the quality of the end-product. Errors and bugs are identified and fixed early enough before checking in the code into the main codebase.
Continuous Integration starts with building the most critical code to layout the product roadmap. This is followed by automated tests on the code in the shared repository before merging the code in the main codebase. Everyone on the team must update their code multiple times a day. Remember that CI is all about keeping the code in a deployable state at all times. Upon testing, developers should focus on fixing any bugs in the code as soon as they are detected.
Continuous Integration takes us to the following critical principle of DevOps; Continuous Testing / Test Automation.
Continuous Testing / Test Automation
Earlier, we talked about how critical automation is as a component of DevOps. Automation starts immediately after the developers start writing the code and run throughout the development lifecycle. Continuous Testing goes side by side with Continuous Integration. It involves continuously reviewing the minor changes integrated into the codebase to enhance the quality of the product.
Continuous Testing is an excellent way to attain a frequent feedback loop on the business risks at all stages of development. First, developers merge the code, and the quality assurance team takes over through test automation. Unlike traditional software development methodologies, the QA team doesn’t wait for developers to write all their code. For many companies, test cases are actually written before the code, in what is called Test Driven-Development (TDD) and the test cases will simply fail until the code is written. In all cases, testing needs to happen as soon as the code gets to the shared repository. At this stage, bugs and errors are detected, and developers can fix them immediately.
Continuous Testing puts customer satisfaction in the mind of the developers at the idea stage of development. The quality assurance team uses Test Automation to check for software stability, performance, and security threats when developers integrate changes into the standard repository. Thus, Continuous Testing enhances the quality of the application and speeds up the development process.
An organization will need to develop a Test Automation strategy when laying down a software development roadmap. It can include unit testing, UI testing, load testing, API Integration testing, among others. Test Automation plans vary from one organization to another depending on the DevOps pipeline and selected metrics.
Continuous Testing and Test Automation bridges the gap between Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). Upon testing and fixing detected bugs, the operations team proceeds to Continuous Delivery – A process that ensures that the code remains in a deployable state throughout the development lifecycle.
Continuous Delivery / Continuous Deployment
Continuous Delivery is the logical next step after Continuous Integration and Continuous Testing and is an integral part of almost every Calavista project. Automating the delivery mechanism massively reduces delivery issues, delivery effort, and delivery time. However, please note that even though the delivery is automated, manual release mechanisms may still be in place for moving a release from one environment to another – especially customer acceptance and production environments. Continuous Deployment automates even these delivery steps. This process goes hand in hand with Continuous Integration. Minor changes are integrated into the central code repository in a deployable state throughout the development lifecycle upon testing the code.
In other terms, Continuous Delivery (CD) is a combination of the processes we have discussed, i.e., building the code, testing, and merging the code in the main codebase in short cycles. In this step, the software is only a push-button away from deployment (release to end-user). At this phase, the team reviews the code changes and verifies/validates the code changes to ensure that the application is ready for release. When the criteria is met, the code is pushed to a production environment.
The changes incorporated in the CI/CD phase are released to the customer in the Continuous Deployment phase. The code changes go through Test Automation to check for quality and stability before releasing them to the production environment. Continuous Deployment focuses on customer or End-user satisfaction. For instance, if a user makes a bug report, developers can make changes to the code. The changes will be automatically deployed upon passing an automated test. The deployment will fail if the newly written code does not pass the test. Therefore, Continuous Deployment reduces the inaccuracy from recently applied code and thereby maintains the software’s stability. Continuous Deployment is the process that enables developers to add new features or updates to a live application.
Continuous Deployment checks the code for the stability of newly integrated code changes before releasing the software to the client or end-user via Test Automation.
Continuous Monitoring
Continuous Monitoring (CM) is usually the last phase of the DevOps pipeline. However, it is just as important as any other phase. The continuous model of operations means that code changes occur rapidly. As a result, Continuous Monitoring helps the DevOps team with the proper insight into what and how their system is operating.
So how does CM work?
DevOps engineers are required to help other teams support and maintain their application. Continuous Monitoring is put into place to enable support to be proactive instead of reactive. Metrics and KPIs are introduced for Continuous Monitoring to enable more visibility and insight into how the production code is both developed and running. In addition to metrics, centralized logging is usually put into place to expedite the diagnosis of issues. These tools bring together a way to monitor all aspects of an application in support of creating a better product.
Continuous Monitoring reduces app downtime. It is because the team is aware of the app’s performance as well as threats on a continuous basis. Besides, bugs are detected and fixed in real-time, thereby enhancing customer satisfaction.
The primary goal of Continuous Monitoring is to ensure maximum performance of the app. This can only be achieved through responding to customer feedback, monitoring user behavior, and deploying changes as often as needed.
Conclusion
I hope this blog has helped you gain a better understanding of DevOps and how we break it out at Calavista. Hopefully on your next project you can reference our Tenets and see how better you can fit DevOps into your organization. Please feel free to reach out as we always love to talk DevOps!
