Like any other gigantic practice, DevOps services and solutions has many definitions, which confuses most people. So, let us initiate the blog by giving a valid and credible definition of DevOps to understand the term better.
Gartner Defines DevOps
“DevOps represents a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through adopting agile, lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach. DevOps emphasizes people (and culture) and seeks to improve collaboration between operations and development teams. DevOps implementations utilize technology — especially automation tools that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic infrastructure from a life cycle perspective.”
The term was first coined in 2009, emphasizing the practice involving the development and operations team working together in collaboration throughout the development lifecycle.
DevOps Team Plays Crucial Role
An automated operational environment helps the organization to make rapid changes with minimal disruption and downtime. DevOps team within the organization is typically responsible for the following types of tasks:
Infrastructure as Code
A virtualized, cloud-based environment can provide computing resources as needed. Typically, such an environment cannot be manually created when the allocation of computing resources is on-demand and flexible. Teams need to know how to automate these steps.
The infrastructure is defined as a code in which users can easily edit and distribute configurations while ensuring the infrastructure is in the anticipated state. This allows you to create repeatable infrastructure configurations.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has many benefits, like removing manually provisioning infrastructure capability to introduce widespread automation of infrastructure management. And easy integration of infrastructure.
Platform as Code
DevOps team identifies software roles in your application stack and automate the steps to create them. Configuration management tools can set up a wide range of application environments using these building blocks.
Deployment Automation
A well-tested feature should be deployed to production with minimal delay. Continuous integration is effective, but the reality is that the situation within an organization is somewhere between manual code pushes and fully automated code deployment processes.
Monitoring and Operational Intelligence
With the advent of log aggregation tools like LogStash and Splunk, it's now possible to mine server logs for errors and insights.
Operations Infrastructure
Infrastructure can be broadly divided into two categories.
The first is a set of processes that must be established and owned by the manufacturing engineering group. The second category is the tools needed to implement automation projects and production technology processes.
Tools for Production Engineering
Our goal is to enumerate the types of tools a production engineering team needs to function effectively. It's also important not to use multiple devices in the same category unless there is a compelling reason to do so.
Documentation Platform
Document solutions can quickly degrade to sorted document repositories. To avoid complete confusion, it's crucial to establish a structure for organizing your documents from the start. A documentation platform used by development and operations teams is an essential coordination component.
Configuration Management
The tools like Puppet or Chef manage system-level configuration and installation of essential software on compute nodes. There are at least three to four configuration management requirements for automated deployments.
Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
Implementing a full-fledged CMDB system may not be warranted, but without a single authoritative source for such configuration, it can become difficult to initiate a fully-developed automation project. You will need a custom solution at least at some point. Application stack and environment configuration management are the following requirements.
Software Configuration Management (SCM)
Traditionally, SCM tools such as Subversion and Git have been restricted within production engineering teams. SCM systems are not just used to develop application code. Any code or configuration data required to replicate the application environment should be managed using an SCM system. Ensure that members of the production engineering team are trained to use her company's SCM system.
Ops code should also be peer-reviewed to get an overview of what gets deployed into production as part of the release process. Now that infrastructure and platform concepts can be implemented as code, the need to include ops code as part of the release process has become increasingly important.
Continuous integration (CI)
A CI platform builds code changes, packages them for deployment, and deploys them to a staging environment where the changes are tested. CI automates the code deployment process, starting with the step where a developer checks code into her SCM system. Developers get immediate feedback on the quality of their code. This will help you fix the error immediately.
Monitoring
A mature monitoring infrastructure will implement controls at different levels: infrastructure, network, system, and application monitoring using industry-standard tools such as Nagios.
Last Mile Monitoring: If you need to monitor consumer web apps or SaaS applications that need to be tested over the internet outside your corporate network, there are many services in this area, such as Apica and Catchpoint providers.
Log aggregation: At an elementary level, log aggregators collect the system and application logs in one place and index them for search. Examining records for error patterns and setting up alerts when errors can help identify issues that may be missed by dedicated monitoring.
Also Read - DevOps Services – Introduction, Benefits, & More
Operational Intelligence and Management Reporting
Executives are interested in a variety of brief data, such as computing resource utilization, application uptime, and various performance indicators such as the percentage of SLAs (Service Level Agreements) met.
Core monitoring systems provide essential information for such reporting but require further aggregation and display. The presentation layer can be popular frameworks using Node.js or custom dashboards built using standard reporting tools such as Actuate, Tableau, and MicroStrategy.
Production technology process
When processes are implemented in a new DevOps solutions company, extra attention must be taken to ensure that the new processes add value and that their implementation does not slow things down.
Release Process and Change Management
The release process is usually concerned with deploying code into production, and change management is concerned with changes affecting production systems.
By definition, the change management process includes application versions. It also tracks infrastructure changes, third-party operating system and software upgrades, database changes, and one-off jobs that can impact computer resources.
Product Documentation and Runbooks
Usually new devops solutions and services company has no product documentation. It is essential to create an operational runbook for the application. Such efforts will continue as the application improves with each release.
Business Continuity Plan (BCP)
A BCP plan addresses the unavailability of the primary operating environment. Unavailability can result from a natural disaster, and BCP and DR are sometimes interchangeable. A backup and replication strategy should be there to support your overall BCP strategy.
Agile Methodology
We have seen manufacturing operations teams get involved in the efforts of organizations and engineering departments to adopt agile processes. While this has proven valid for product development groups, it can be clumsy and forced in a production environment, mainly because operations teams do not have complete control over their time.
Become part of the Scrum development team. Engineering projects are more than just product development. The infrastructure for running your application and its monitoring needs should be planned from the start.
Security
A weak security strategy puts both the DevOps solutions company and its customers at risk. New business hardly recovers after a significant security breach as it loses customer faith and reputation.
Unit-tested software often has no password protection or communication encryption. It is vital to run production applications with only these basic protections. Regularly run industry-standard tests such as PEN tests and quickly roughen your environment based on the results.
Begin a process to notify operations teams of the latest security patches, etc., from cloud providers or third-party tools. As part of building a manufacturing infrastructure, deploying standard tools and implementing advanced processes across an organization are striking. Data security must be a top priority for any organization.
DevOps Principles
Now that you have understood DevOps team tools, roles, and responsibilities. Let us get to know about DevOps principles.
Collaboration
The primary principle of DevOps is- collaboration. The development and operations team work together as a 'functional team,' a team that communicates openly, shares honest feedback, and collaborates throughout the entire development and deployment cycle.
Collaboration is the essence of DevOps.
Team members are responsible for ensuring deliverables quality, which further leads to "full-stack" development. DevOps team must work till the completion of the project- from having the "idea" to "final delivery."
Automation
Another essential practice of DevOps is to automate the software development lifecycle. Automation is a prime key in writing code and developing new features to increase team productivity. With the proper integration of automation, teams can achieve improvement with short iteration times- which offers them time to give good customer service.
Monitor the Process Often
The DevOps team must monitor the entire process with keen interest and attention- everything from apps, logs, infrastructure, and systems. Continuous monitoring detects any issue way before it arises and becomes a problem. This practice is suggested to deal with a problem as soon as it exists.
Shared and End-to-end Responsibility
When a team moves forward with one goal, every member shares the responsibility of the entire project till its completion. Both teams are accountable if some issue remains unsolved.
It's All About the Consumer
In the end, it's all about the consumer. DevOps team needs to utilize every possible feedback and develop solutions around user needs. Established DevOps practices enable speedy collection and on-time response to users' feedback with the help of real-time live monitoring.
The Future of DevOps
Building and sticking to a DevOps culture calls for the whole team to work in unison, which holds the DevOps team apart from the rest of the organization.
Since the advent of DevOps, it has proved effective and progressive in every sphere. From speeding up the development process to getting quick solutions, DevOps has proven to be 'useful.'
In short, DevOps brings value to entire operations. It's not going anywhere sooner.
The future is filled with new possibilities for DevOps; it can get tied to cloud-native security to bring significant changes. We can see a rise in DevOps consulting services and solutions companies.
Some experts have predicted that the broader adoption of BizDevOps can further eliminate business staff and DevOps team boundaries. Ultimately, the DevOps team will get far more attention and significance and be more involved in the decision-making process.
We have covered every aspect of DevOps; if you have any doubts, get in touch with us.
