DevOps is a software development methodology that integrates development and operations teams. This methodology allows developers to focus solely on development and deploy their code within seconds, as many times as needed.
DevOps: The New Frontier of Software Development
Since the early days of client-server applications, development teams and operations/system teams have been at odds.
This represented a major organizational problem. The people writing the code had no connection to those responsible for its implementation and maintenance. More than that, developers and system administrators had different goals and even conflicting departmental directives. They often didn’t share a common location either. The result was complex, if not non-existent, communication.
On the other hand, those responsible for system maintenance and administration also had their perspective. Developers didn’t follow security policies in development/test/production environments. Borrowed credentials among team members and deployment schedules were not adhered to. And the outcomes are easy to guess. Delivery delays, degraded quality, and the inexcusable consequence: dissatisfied customers.
In 2008, while Agile methodologies were booming, a Belgian named Patrick Debois had the idea of applying Agile to the operational IT environment. And he did it by integrating development and operations into the same context. This is how DevOps was born.
DevOps unifies the two departments under the same Agile umbrella. In doing so, they share goals, values, and premises.
DevOps Best Practices
At this stage, it is clear that DevOps is a new way of thinking about software development.
Let’s now look at the DevOps best practices to implement Continuous Development. This is based on the standard application development life cycle.
Continuous Integration (CI)
By using configuration management (CM) tools alongside specific testing and development tools, you can precisely know which parts of the code you’re creating are ready for production with the minimum number of bugs.
To achieve this, smooth information exchange between the testing and development teams is essential to identify and address code issues in an agile manner.
Continuous Delivery
Once we have bug-free code, continuous delivery automates the introduction of changes into the code to upload it into the pre-production environment.
Continuous Deployment
Similar to continuous delivery, continuous deployment automates the release of new code into the production environment, minimizing the risks involved.
This allows code changes to be released multiple times a day without issues, thanks to container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, which isolate environments while maintaining code consistency across different staging platforms.
Now, we still need to discuss two practices that, although less implemented, are still important: continuous monitoring and infrastructure as code.
DevOps Best Practices: Continuous Monitoring
This enables monitoring the code at all times, even in production, including the infrastructure supporting it. Through a loop, errors are detected and immediately notified, allowing faulty code to revert back to the development phase and start the CI/CD cycle again.
Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as code is a highly useful practice that spans the DevOps phases. It allows for automating infrastructure requirements to enable proper software operation. By using machine-readable definition files instead of physical hardware configurations, dynamic adaptation of published software infrastructure requirements becomes possible. A typical case is the dynamic creation of a new storage volume using Docker or Kubernetes, which can be removed when no longer needed.
This not only provides unprecedented hardware scalability agility but also enables IT teams to monitor active environment configurations, track changes, and simplify the restoration of configurations by adjusting costs to real-time needs.