Introduction

Despite the fact that DevOps usage is growing in both major corporations and web-native firms, there is still some uncertainty regarding what the word implies. Is DevOps culture, a movement, a methodology, a philosophy, or a combination of these? Is DevOps a term that has diverse meanings for different people?

Regardless of how you define DevOps, achieving DevOps success is unquestionably a journey. And no matter where you are on your DevOps journey, we can assist you in answering a few key questions, such as:

• What is DevOps?
• Where did it come from?
• What problems led to DevOps?
• How does DevOps “work”?
• How widely used is DevOps today?
• Why are people adopting DevOps?
• What are the benefits?

Chapter 1: What Is DevOps?

Patrick Debois, one of the industry's gurus, invented the term "DevOps" in 2009. The phrase "DevOps" was coined by combining the words "development" and "operations," and it serves as a beginning point for figuring out exactly what individuals mean when they say "DevOps." DevOps isn't a method, a technology, or a standard, to be clear. DevOps is sometimes referred to as a "culture" by adherents, a notion that New Relic supports. We also use the terms "DevOps movement" and "DevOps environment" to refer to an IT organization that has embraced a DevOps culture when discussing adoption rates and future trends.

This primer will go into further detail on DevOps, but first, we'll need a working definition. This one from Gartner appeals to us:

“DevOps represents a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of 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.”

Importantly, the definition of DevOps has extended to include the methods, culture, and mentality that are utilized to reduce the software development life cycle and provide features, fixes, and upgrades more often utilizing rapid feedback loops.

Chapter 2: Where Did DevOps Come From?

DevOps was not invented out of thin air, despite the magical tone of some of the genesis legends. Rather, the seeds of DevOps were sown many years ago and have been cultivated by forward-thinking IT specialists from a variety of fields. The following are the two major precursors of DevOps:

• Enterprise systems management (ESM). Many of the folks that helped define DevOps, in the beginning, were system administrators. Configuration management, system monitoring, automated provisioning, and the toolchain approach were all brought to DevOps by these operations professionals.

• Agile development. “DevOps may be seen as an extension of Agile—agile software development prescribes tight cooperation of consumers, product management, developers, and (occasionally) QA to fill in the gaps and swiftly iterate toward a better product,” according to one observer. [DevOps recognizes that] service delivery and how the app and systems interact are also important parts of the client's value proposition, and the product team should address those concerns as a top-level item. DevOps is just extending Agile concepts beyond the limits of code to the complete provided service from this perspective.”

Chapter 3: What Problems Led to the Creation of DevOps?

Although developers and system administrators don't always agree on everything, they do agree that their clients on the business side of the house sometimes tug them in opposite directions. On the one hand, corporate users expect as much change as possible—new products, services, and income sources. They desire a system that is stable and free of outages and disruptions at the same time. As a result, businesses are faced with the dilemma of either providing changes fast and dealing with an unstable production environment, or maintaining a stable but stagnant one.

Neither option is acceptable to business leaders, which is unsurprising. And, more importantly, neither permits a company to provide its clients the best possible options.

Developers are willing to provide software at a rapid pace because that is what they are generally employed to do. Operations, on the other hand, understand that making quick changes without appropriate protections risks destabilizing the system, which is contrary to their mandate.

DevOps was created to solve this problem by bringing together everyone involved in software development and deployment—business users, developers, testers, security engineers, system administrators, and occasionally others—into a single, highly automated workflow with a single goal: to deliver high-quality software quickly while maintaining the integrity and security of the system.

What is the best way for these diverse groups to work together? For example, by adhering to a set of values that transcend traditional disciplinary borders and roles:

• Set expectations and priorities and the fundamental beliefs that guide them.
• Collaborate both within and between teams on problem-solving.
• Automate common and repetitive processes to free up time for higher-level work.
• Integrate feedback into the work, measuring everything that is moved into production.
• Share the data with everyone involved to foster a more effective culture of working well together across different skills and specialized knowledge.

Chapter 4: DevOps, Agile, and SRE Explained

Companies frequently discuss moving to DevOps, recruiting SREs, and becoming more agile, but what exactly do these phrases mean?

Teams iterate in Agile and Lean environments, with short development cycles and quick feedback. Agile focuses on culture and is unconcerned with the technologies utilized.

DevOps is a method of collaboration across engineering companies that employs cross-functional teams. DevOps begins with culture and progresses to tooling.

Engineering firms automate through SRE (System Reliability Engineering), delegating highly scaled processes to individuals with a software engineering mindset. SRE begins with tooling and progresses to culture.

DevOps variants (such as “SecDevOps”) involves the insertion or addition of another organization/practice earlier in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), and the prevalence of these different types of DevOps speaks to the increasing integration of functions in modern organizations.   

Chapter 5: How Does DevOps “Work”?

DevOps, like other civilizations, has numerous variants on the topic. Collaboration, automation, continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous testing, continuous monitoring, and quick remediation are all skills that most observers believe are common to nearly all DevOps cultures.

Collaboration

Rather than pointing fingers at one another, IT operations and development collaborate (no, really). While the necessity for collaboration was the reason for its inception, DevOps goes well beyond the IT organization, because everyone involved in the delivery of software has to collaborate (not just between dev and ops, but all teams, including test, product management, and executives)

Automation

DevOps is largely reliant on automation, which necessitates the use of technologies. You create your own tools. You purchase tools. Tools that are free and open source. Tools that are only available to a limited number of people. And those tools aren't merely strewn about the laboratory. Toolchains are used to automate major sections of the end-to-end software development and deployment process in DevOps.

Warning: Because DevOps technologies are so great, it's easy to dismiss DevOps as merely a collection of tools. While it's true that DevOps is heavily reliant on technologies, it's also much more.

Continuous Integration

Continuous integration is typically seen in DevOps environments since DevOps arose from Agile culture, and continuous integration is a core principle of Agile:

“Continuous integration (CI), a technique created and named by Grady Booch that continuously combines source code changes from all developers on a team into a shared mainline, is a cornerstone of DevOps. As new code is introduced by others, this continuous merging protects a developer's local copy of a software project from wandering too far off, preventing catastrophic merge conflicts.”

The agile development idea of continuous integration has cultural implications for the development team. When developers are forced to integrate their work with the work of other developers on a regular basis—at least daily—integration difficulties and disputes emerge considerably sooner than in waterfall development. To obtain this advantage, however, developers must communicate with one another considerably more frequently—a process that goes contrary to the idea of the lone genius coder working on a module for weeks or months until it is "ready" to be released into the wild. In DevOps, that seed of open, regular communication flourishes.

Continuous Testing

It's easy to neglect the testing aspect of DevOps until you're burnt. “Given the growing cost and effect of software failures, you can't afford to launch a release that disrupts the existing user experience or introduces new features that expose the company to new security, reliability, or compliance risks,” according to Gartner. While continuous integration and delivery receive the most attention, continuous testing is quietly establishing itself as a crucial component of DevOps.

Continuous testing isn't simply a quality assurance activity; it really begins in the development environment. The days of developers just throwing code over the wall to QA and saying, "Have at it," are long gone. Quality is everyone's responsibility in a DevOps context. Quality is built into the code, and test data sets are provided. Automation test cases and the testing environment are configured by QA engineers.

On the QA side, speed is critical. After all, if the quality assurance cycle takes days or weeks, you're back to a long, drawn-out waterfall timeline. The problem of rapid turnaround is handled not just by automating parts of the testing process, but also by rethinking test methodologies:

“Continuous testing creates a central system of decision that helps you assess the business risk each application presents to your organization. Applied consistently, it guides development teams to meet business expectations and provides managers visibility to make informed trade-off decisions in order to optimize the business value of a release candidate.”

Although it may come as a surprise, the operations function plays a critical role in testing and quality assurance. Monitoring tools and correctly prepared test environments may be ensured by operations. They can help with functional, load, stress, and leak testing, as well as provide analysis based on their previous work with similar applications in production.

The benefits of continuous testing much outweigh the time and effort required. In a DevOps context, the test function aids developers in balancing quality and speed. The use of automated technologies lowers the cost of testing and helps test engineers to better utilize their time. Continuous testing, above all, reduces test cycles by allowing integration testing sooner in the process.

Continuous Delivery

The team at Amazon Web Services defines continuous delivery as a DevOps “software development practice where code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a release to production. It expands upon continuous integration by deploying all code changes to a testing environment and/or a production environment after the build stage. When continuous delivery is implemented properly, developers will always have a deployment-ready build artifact that has passed through a standardized test process.

The actual frequency of releases varies considerably based on the company's history and objectives. When compared to middling performers, who release once a week to once a month, high-performing businesses utilizing DevOps achieve numerous deployments every day.

The content of what is released differs as well. Potential releases are triaged by QA and operations in certain organizations: some go straight to users, some are returned to development, and a few are simply not deployed at all. Other firms push everything from developers to consumers, relying on real-time monitoring and quick fixes to mitigate the effect of a rare failure.

Continuous Monitoring

There's no way to conduct the type of thorough pre-release testing necessary in waterfall development techniques in a continuous delivery company because of the sheer quantity of releases. Failures must be discovered and repaired in real-time in a DevOps system. How do you go about doing that? Continuous monitoring is a significant component of it.

Teams assess the performance and availability of software through constant monitoring to enhance stability. Continuous monitoring aids in promptly identifying the source of problems so that outages may be avoided and user complaints can be minimized. Some monitoring specialists even argue that monitoring should be included in the definition of service since it is so important to service delivery.

Monitoring, like testing, begins during the development phase. The same monitoring techniques that are used in production may be used in development to identify performance issues before they reach production.

DevOps necessitates two types of monitoring: server monitoring and application performance monitoring. Because there is no effective monitoring without the right tools, monitoring conversations rapidly devolve into tool discussions.

Chapter 6: Who’s Adopting DevOps?

DevOps is making major inroads into IT companies all around the world, from early-stage startups to 100-year-old enterprises. According to one poll, 74 percent of businesses have adopted DevOps in some form.

What kind of businesses are using DevOps? While web-native “unicorns” like Etsy, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix are frequently touted as DevOps leaders, today any type of company may participate in DevOps. Other DevOps success stories in the headlines include mainstream media firm Sony Pictures, financial services behemoth Barclays Bank, and construction goods maker USG.

Surprisingly, corporations are leading the pace, with 81 percent indicating that DevOps is being used in some capacity inside their firm. DevOps is also proving beneficial to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMBs), with 70% claiming to use it. Significantly, there is ample evidence that the size of a firm is not a reliable indicator of DevOps success.

DevOps is being used by even government and quasi-government entities. Take, for example, Fannie Mae, which is transforming its business with DevOps to go from a company that "changes extremely slowly to one that changes very rapidly."

The US Patent and Trade Office switched to DevOps and now sees 1,000 automated builds each week on average. Production containers, automated processes, and microservices are just a few of the ways the General Services Administration (GSA) is modernizing its IT operations to deliver projects quicker and with greater quality.

Even as cloud and container technologies accelerate DevOps adoption globally, DevOps author and expert Gene Kim points out that the discipline still has a long way to go. DevOps fueling fresh development initiatives in firms where it has already established a beachhead is a common example.

“We now have the proof points to prove that DevOps isn't only for the unicorns like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Netflix, but it's for any technology company, especially large, complicated ones. What excites me the most is that they're obtaining the same kinds of results that we've usually only seen in unicorns.”

Conclusion

The data is obvious after a decade of the big DevOps experiment: DevOps is here to stay—and for very good reasons. DevOps has succeeded in combining business users, developers, test engineers, security engineers, and system administrators into a single workflow focused on achieving customer needs, something many felt was unachievable. Why would they do so willingly? Because there is something for everyone in it. When developers and system administrators stop bickering and start helping one another, everyone's blood pressure drops.  Business managers are happy because they get the software products that they need to sell products and services. Executives watch their beloved dashboard metrics—revenue, customer satisfaction, system reliability—heading steadily north. And everyone is able to deliver the best results and overall experience possible to the customer.

Gains like this, on the other hand, aren't easy to come by. You need the capacity to precisely monitor all changes in your environment to effectively deploy code more often while keeping your systems running. Through integrated alerts and dashboards, the New Relic platform provides developers and operations with full-stack visibility—from the digital customer experience to applications and dynamic infrastructure—helping everyone within an organization enjoy a shared understanding of how software is deployed and performs in real-time.

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