What Is DevOps?

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If you are in the IT industry then you might have certainly heard one of the most trending buzzwords called DevOps. If you want to pursue a career in DevOps, then it is certainly beneficial and rewarding to go for a DevOps Certification. Before we proceed further, I will suggest you to go through the following blogs:

Top 10 reasons to learn DevOps

Who is a DevOps Engineer?

A lot of big IT companies have adopted DevOps as their way forward. So in this blog, I will discuss what exactly is DevOps and the points that I will be covering are as follows:

The term DevOps is a combination of two words namely Development and Operations. DevOps is a practice that allows a single team to manage the entire application development life cycle, that is, development, testing, deployment, and monitoring.
The ultimate goal of DevOps is to decrease the duration of the system’s development life cycle while delivering features, fixes, and updates frequently in close synchronization with business objectives.
DevOps is a software development approach with the help of which you can develop superior quality software quickly and with more reliability. It consists of various stages such as continuous development, continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous deployment, and continuous monitoring.

So since what is DevOps, let us have a look at the history of DevOps.

History of DevOps

Before DevOps, We had two approaches for software development namely the Waterfall and the Agile.

Waterfall Model

The waterfall model is a software development model that is pretty straight forward and linear. This model follows a top-down approach.
This model has various starting with Requirements gathering and analysis. This is the phase where you get the requirements from the client for developing an application. After this, you try to analyze these requirements.

The next phase is the Design phase where you prepare a blueprint of the software. Here, you think about how the software is actually going to look like.
Once the design is ready, you move further with the Implementation phase where you begin with the coding for the application. The team of developers works together on various components of the application.
Once you complete the application development, you test it in the Verification phase. There are various tests conducted on the application such as unit testing, integration testing, performance testing, etc.
After all the tests on the application are completed, it is deployed onto the production servers.
At last, comes the Maintenance phase. In this phase, the application is monitored for performance. Any issues related to the performance of the application are resolved in this phase.

Advantages of the Waterfall Model:

Simple to understand and use
Allows for easy testing and analysis
Saves a significant amount of time and money
Good for small projects if all requirements are clearly defined
Allows for departmentalization & managerial control

Disadvantages of Waterfall Model:

Risky and uncertain
Lack of visibility of the current progress
Not suitable when the requirements keep changing
Difficult to make changes to the product when it is in the testing phase
The end product is available only at the end of the cycle
Not suitable for large and complex projects

Agile Methodology

Agile Methodology is an iterative based software development approach where the software project is broken down into various iterations or sprints. Each iteration has phases like the waterfall model such as Requirements Gathering, Design, Development, Testing, and Maintenance. The duration of each iteration is generally 2-8 weeks.

Agile Process

In Agile, a company releases the application with some high priority features in the first iteration.
After its release, the end-users or the customers give you feedback about the performance of the application.
Then you make the necessary changes into the application along with some new features and the application is again released which is the second iteration.
You repeat this entire procedure until you achieve the desired software quality.

Advantages of Agile Model

It adaptively responds to requirement changes favorably
Fixing errors early in the development process makes this process more cost-effective
Improves the quality of the product and makes it highly error-free
Allows for direct communication between people involved in software project
Highly suitable for large & long-term projects
Minimum resource requirements & very easy to manage

Disadvantages of Agile Model

Highly dependent on clear customer requirements
Quite Difficult to predict time and effort for larger projects
Not suitable for complex projects
Lacks documentation efficiency
Increased maintainability risks

Now let us move on and discuss the DevOps stages and tools.

DevOps Stages and Tools

As mentioned earlier, the various stages such as continuous development, continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous deployment, and continuous monitoring constitute the DevOps Life cycle. Now let us have a look at each of the stages of DevOps life cycle one by one.

Stage – 1: Continuous Development

Tools Used: Git, SVN, Mercurial, CVS

Process Flow:

This is the phase that involves ‘planning‘ and ‘coding‘ of the software. You decide the project vision during the planning phase and the developers begin developing the code for the application.
There are no DevOps tools that are required for planning, but there are a number of tools for maintaining the code.
The code can be in any language, but you maintain it by using Version Control tools. This process of maintaining the code is known as Source Code Management.
After the code is developed, then you move to the Continuous Integration phase.

Stage – 2: Continuous Integration

Tools: Jenkins, TeamCity, Travis

Process Flow:

This stage is the core of the entire DevOps life cycle. It is a practice in which the developers require to commit changes to the source code more frequently. This may be either on a daily or weekly basis.
You then build every commit and this allows early detection of problems if they are present. Building code not only involves compilation but it also includes code review, unit testing, integration testing, and packaging.
The code supporting new functionality is continuously integrated with the existing code. Since there is a continuous development of software, you need to integrate the updated code continuously as well as smoothly with the systems to reflect changes to the end-users.
In this stage, you use the tools for building/ packaging the code into an executable file so that you can forward it to the next phases.

Stage – 3: Continuous Testing

Tools: Jenkins, Selenium TestNG, JUnit

Process Flow:

This is the stage where you test the developed software continuously for bugs using automation testing tools. These tools allow QAs to test multiple code-bases thoroughly in parallel to ensure that there are no flaws in the functionality. In this phase, you can use Docker Containers for simulating the test environment.
Selenium is used for automation testing, and the reports are generated by TestNG. You can automate this entire testing phase with the help of a Continuous Integration tool called Jenkins.
Suppose you have written a selenium code in Java to test your application. Now you can build this code using ant or maven. Once you build the code, you then test it for User Acceptance Testing (UAT). This entire process can be automated using Jenkins.

Stage – 4: Continuous Deployment

Tools Used:

Configuration Management – Chef, Puppet, Ansible

Containerization – Docker, Vagrant

Process Flow:

This is the stage where you deploy the code on the production servers. It is also important to ensure that you correctly deploy the code on all the servers. Before moving on, let us try to understand a few things about Configuration management and Containerization tools. These set of tools here help in achieving Continuous Deployment (CD).

Configuration Management is the act of establishing and maintaining consistency in an application’s functional requirements and performance. Let me put this in easier words, it is the act of releasing deployments to servers, scheduling updates on all servers and most importantly keeping the configurations consistent across all the servers.
Containerization tools also play an equally crucial role in the deployment stage. The containerization tools help produce consistency across Development, Test, Staging as well as Production environments. Besides this, they also help in scaling-up and scaling-down of instances swiftly.

Stage – 5: Continuous Monitoring

Tools Used: Splunk, ELK Stack, Nagios, New Relic

Process Flow:

This is a very critical stage of the DevOps life cycle where you continuously monitor the performance of your application. Here you record vital information about the use of the software. You then process this information to check the proper functionality of the application. You resolve system errors such as low memory, server not reachable, etc in this phase.

This practice involves the participation of the Operations team who will monitor the user activity for bugs or any improper behavior of the system. The Continuous Monitoring tools help you monitor the application’s performance and the servers closely and also enable you to check the health of the system proactively.

Lastly, we will discuss who exactly is a DevOps Engineer.

Who is a DevOps Engineer?

DevOps Engineer is somebody who understands the Software Development Lifecycle and has the outright understanding of various automation tools for developing digital pipelines (CI/ CD pipelines).

DevOps Engineer works with developers and the IT staff to oversee the code releases. They are either developers who get interested in deployment and network operations or sysadmins who have a passion for scripting and coding and move into the development side where they can improve the planning of test and deployment.

So that was all from my side in this article on What is DevOps. I hope you have understood everything that I have discussed here. If you have any questions kindly mention that in the comments section.

Following is a list of blogs which you might find interesting:

Now that you have understood What is DevOps, check out the DevOps training by Edureka, a trusted online learning company with a network of more than 250,000 satisfied learners spread across the globe. The Edureka DevOps Certification Training course helps learners to understand What is DevOps and gain expertise in various DevOps processes and tools such as Puppet, Jenkins, Nagios, Ansible, Chef, Saltstack and GIT for automating multiple steps in SDLC.

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