A Beginners Guide To DevOps Service And Its Benefits

DevOps helps businesses move faster with security by combining development and operations into one process. This way, there are fewer steps and hands-off between departments, and software can be developed and delivered more efficiently. As a result, businesses using DevOps have a competitive advantage over other companies. 

🔸What Is DevOps? 

DevOps combines cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that allow organizations to deliver applications and services quickly. This speed enables organizations to provide their customers better and compete more effectively in the market.

The DevOps approach has evolved over time, and several DevOps trends have emerged in recent years. For example, organizations are increasingly adopting DevOps-as-a-Service (DaaS) solutions to improve the efficiency of their delivery process. Another trend is containerization and orchestration tools such as Docker and Kubernetes, which enable organizations to automate the deployment and scaling of applications.

Read More: 10 Best DevOps Tools You Need to Know in 2023

DevOps practices enable teams to accelerate delivery by utilizing automation, collaboration, fast feedback, and iterative improvement. The DevOps delivery process helps development teams to build and ship applications faster by expanding on the agile approach. 

While adopting DevOps services, you are deciding to improve the application’s flow and value delivery by encouraging a more collaborative environment at all phases of the development cycle. The improved collaboration will help your team to communicate better, share ideas more effectively and work together more efficiently. 

DevOps consists of various stages such as continuous development, integration, testing, deployment, and monitoring. This system helps to create better quality software in a more timely manner. 

🔸Continuous Delivery To Accelerate Time To Market

We usually hear DevOps about continuous delivery. But are these two different or the same? How are they connected?

Most importantly, how can continuous delivery accelerate the time to market?

The need that brought on the demand for continuous delivery is faster time to market. In addition, continuous delivery is simple; the enterprise no longer does the traditional release with user stories. 

DevOps is all about making automation a key to achieving continuous delivery. Automation is needed for each stage of the SDLC, including test automation and the delivery pipeline. This ensures that the dev and ops team get instant feedback to quickly make necessary changes and revisions. Explore how automation can help teams develop, test, and deploy applications faster.

🔸How Do DevOps Works?

As we discussed, several key steps are involved in the DevOps process, from continuous development to deployment. Let’s examine each of these phases so that you have a better understanding of the DevOps lifecycle. 

Fig: How Do DevOps Works?

👉Continuous Planning

Businesses can start small and gradually test the value or vision by continuously planning and leveraging lean principles. This process can help enterprises to adapt continually, measure progress, learn from customer needs, shift direction as needed with agility, and update the business plan. The continuous planning also includes discussing security, cost optimization, best practices, and preparing for worst-case scenarios. 

 👉Continuous Development

This phase involves ‘coding’ the software. Then, as the product’s vision is determined in the planning phase, the developers begin developing the code for the project. There are several tools available to maintain the code efficiently. 

The project’s code can be written in any language, but it is maintained using version control tools. The most popular tools are Git, SVN, CVS, and JIRA. The tools assure the development of a quality project and enable communication between the product and the operations team. 

👉Continuous Testing

In this stage, software that has been developed undergoes continuous testing for bugs. For continuous testing, there are tools like Selenium and TestNG. These tools enable QAs to test multiple code bases in parallel to ensure no flaws in the functionality.

Selenium performs the automation testing, and the reports are generated through TestNG. You can automate the entire testing phase with the help of a continuous integration tool called Jenkins. Automation saves time, effort, and labor in implementing the tests instead of handling them manually. It also gets easier to evaluate the test cases through the generated reports. 

👉Continuous Integration

This stage is a crucial part of the entire DevOps lifecycle. A good development practice for code is regularly checking the code into a version control system. This helps catch any issues between the old and latest versions. Some popular tools used for this are Git, JIRA, and SVN. 

The code supporting new versions is continuously integrated with the existing code. Due to the continuous development of software, code updates need to be integrated seamlessly and continuously with the system to show changes to end users.

Fig: CI/CD process with automated code review

One of the popular tools used in this phase is Jenkins. Whenever there is a change in the Git repository, Jenkins gets the updated code and prepares a build of that code. The build is an executable file that comes as a war or a jar. 

Related Read: Jenkins CI/CD To Deploy Angular Application On Azure Storage

👉Continuous Deployment

Continuous deployment is a great way to deploy your product without any performance issues when deploying new code. A key component of CD is that the code must be able to deploy on all available servers without any problems. 

This process eliminates the need for scheduled releases and accelerates feedback, allowing developers to address issues more quickly and accurately.

As the code is deployed continuously, configuration management tools play an important role in implementing tasks quickly and frequently. 

Related Read: What, How, and Why of CI/CD

👉Continuous Monitoring

The performance of your application is important to monitor during the DevOps lifecycle. In this stage, you will record information about how the software is used. This information is processed to ensure that the application functions properly. System errors can be resolved in this phase. 

We identify the reason behind any issues that may arise. This helps us maintain the security and availability of our services. In addition, we can keep our systems running smoothly by automatically detecting and fixing problems as they occur. 

This practice involves the participation of the operations team, who will monitor the user activity for bugs or any improper behavior in the system. 

Related Read: How To Ensure Quality With Automation

👉Continuous Feedback

Getting feedback on your application is essential to ascertain and analyze the outcome. In addition, this feedback will help you improve the current version and release a new version that meets the needs of your stakeholders. 

Analyzing the software users’ feedback is crucial to improving app development. This information is significant as it allows developers to understand how the software is being used and analyze any issues that need to be addressed. Furthermore, user feedback can provide helpful suggestions for improving the software. 

👉Continuous Operations

The last stage of DevOps is all about continuity. The DevOps operations help automate the process and allow the developers to identify issues quickly. It helps in building a better version of the project. 

Development cycles in continuous operations tend to be shorter, allowing organizations to market quickly. DevOps service companies help achieve this by making software products better and more efficient, attracting new customers. 

🔸Difference Between DevOps And Agile

There are a few key differences between DevOps and Agile, and it’s important to be aware before diving into the technical side. First, DevOps founding principle is to improve agility in development and operations. In contrast, Agile’s focus is solely on growth. But before we move forward with the technical difference, there are a few things to be clear on. 

Firstly, DevOps is not a replacement for Agile! On the contrary, DevOps is a direct successor to Agile. 

DevOps as a service brings development and operations teams together, while Agile is an iterative approach focused on collaboration, customer feedback, and small rapid releases. 

DevOps focuses on testing and delivery, while the agile process focuses on constant changes. In addition, DevOps requires a large team, while Agile demands a small group.

The agile method can help managers in several ways, from assisting with communication, supporting a project, and staying on track. DevOps is all about collaboration and working together to get things done efficiently. 

Agile development is all about creating software quickly and efficiently.

On the other hand, DevOps service companies are taking that software ready for delivery and deploying it securely.

🔸How Can Businesses Benefit From DevOps Methodology?

DevOps is quickly becoming a popular tool for startups. But before implementing DevOps strategies, businesses want to be sure that it is worth the risk and effort. Let’s find out the benefit of DevOps for businesses below; 

👉Speed

The DevOps model enables developers and operations teams to move quickly and release service updates quicker. This means that you can innovate for delivery faster, adapt to changing markets better, and grow more efficiently at driving business results. For example, microservices and continuous delivery let employees take ownership of services and quickly release updates. 

👉Improved Customer Experience

DevOps can help your business develop solutions faster, which in turn, can improve customer service. In recent studies, over 70% of DevOps service companies reported improved customer experiences. The enhanced customer experience leads to an increase in revenue and profits. This is one of the main reasons that business owners are eager to implement DevOps practices in their organizations. 

👉Highly Scalable

Operating and managing your infrastructure at scale can be a challenge. However, automation and consistency can help you manage complex or changing systems efficiently and with reduced risk. For example, infrastructure as code can help you manage your development, testing, and production environments more efficiently. However, the scalability depends on the requirements of the projects. For instance, if the server needs more resources, the team will scale up, and vice versa. This helps the team to have control of the resources and also optimize the costs. 

👉More Focus On Innovation

DevOps services help businesses to save time when it comes to solving problems. Solving problems quicker means your business can limit losses and get back on track sooner. This is an advantage that can save your company a lot of money. So, if you want your organization to improve its problem-solving capabilities, DevOps is one of the business benefits that cannot be forgotten.

👉Reliability

Quality control for application updates and infrastructure changes is always important, especially when you want to deliver quickly while maintaining a good experience for end users. Continuous Integration and delivery practices help test each change to be functional and safe.

Additionally, monitoring and logging practices help you keep track of performance in real time. 

👉Security

DevOps is all about speed, but that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice security. Instead, you can maintain control and compliance using automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques. For example, you can define and track security at scale using infrastructure and policy as code.

Related Read: Top 10 Key Benefits Of DevOps for Business Growth

👉Backups And Monitoring

DevOps methodology implements backups and stores the user data to provide more customizable and upgraded services to a particular area or region. Continuous monitoring can also help DevOps teams comply with regulations by providing data that can be used to show that an application is meeting all of the requirements. To have cost efficiency, we at Mindbowser attach some retention period in backup, in which we can soft delete in some time, like in 30 days.