DevOps Fundamentals For an Absolute Beginner
As an absolute beginner, you may find yourself a little confused by what DevOps is, why it is important, and the primary goals of DevOps. The blog will give you an insight on what is meant by DevOps and its goals so you can develop an understanding of the basics.
DevOps is an amalgamation of the terms, development, and operations. It represents a collaborative workflow adopted for tasks undertaken by a company’s development and IT operations teams. This combination of workflows, tools, cultural philosophies can lead to an increased ability of an organization to develop and deliver applications and services faster.
A more specific interpretation of DevOps is that it is the implementation of iterative software development, automation, programmable infrastructure development, and maintenance. It also encompasses changes within the organizational culture, such as the collaboration and cohesion between development teams and operations teams.
In addition, it also focuses on the alignment of tech projects with business requirements. DevOps can potentially change the way softwares are developed and delivered to clients. Furthermore, its impacts can also be observed on the provided services, job roles, tools, and the accepted best practices within the industry.
Before we delve into a bit more detail about the primary goals of DevOps, one fundamental thing to understand is that DevOps is not a technology but a specific approach that does employ several common methodologies such as continuous integration and delivery or deployment (CI/CD) tools. These also include monitoring, configuration management, integration of collaborative platforms, and more.
The Primary Goals of DevOps
The primary goals of DevOps that are present in every successful endeavor involving this methodology are given below:
Effective Collaboration
DevOps, at its core, is a collaborative effort that essentially takes individual teams out of their narrow silos to a more cohesive workflow. The goal of a DevOps environment is to ensure that every process, from development to deployment, is well defined and each team member is fully involved in the overall workflow. By defining the workflow and the required collaborations, the process is greatly accelerated.
Creation of Scalable Infrastructure Platforms
In today’s business environment, applications and softwares being scalable is a vital requirement. And ideally, the process should be fully automated and reliable. The older approach often led to higher time requirements for scalability and upgrades of applications and solutions. But because the DevOps approach defines each process and the SOPs for team collaboration, it allows a company an increased ability to create scalable digital solutions, thus allowing it to adjust to increased traffic, changing trends, or simply the evolving requirements of the clients.
On-Demand Release
One of the primary goals of DevOps is to automate the process of release management because it offers companies a broad range of advantages over more traditional release management methodologies. As stated within the blog, the continuous shifting of trends in the digital sphere and the changes in requirements means that companies need to keep their developments in a releasable state. The goal is to have a continuous delivery system in place so that new features can be added and the deliverable can go live at any required stage.
Efficient Feedback Loops
Feedback and communication are crucial between teams to ensure rapid development and updates. The collaborative nature of DevOps involves greatly automating testing and reporting between teams to ensure efficient feedback loops. One of the primary goals of DevOps is to have all the teams have a solid understanding of the required changes throughout the development and deployment cycle of an application. The efficient feedback loops facilitate both the operations team and developers in making better decisions collectively.
Conclusion
To summarize, fundamentally, DevOps is about defining and improving work processes through collaborative efforts and clearly defined modalities of operations and development. It is interesting to note that a growing number of IT operations and development professionals are pushing to include other areas in the DevOps domain, such as business (BizDevOps), security (DevSecOps), and more. And lastly, DevOps’ ability to work in tandem with other development avenues gives it an advantage over older methodologies.