Getting started with DevOps

The term DevOps was introduced in 2007-2009 by Patrick Debois, Gene Kim, and John Willis, and it represents the combination of Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops). It has given rise to a movement that advocates bringing developers and operations together within teams. This delivers added business value to users more quickly, which makes it more competitive in the market.

DevOps culture is a set of practices that reduce the barriers between developers, who want to innovate and deliver faster, and operations, who want to guarantee the stability of production systems and the quality of the system changes they make.

DevOps culture is also the extension of agile processes (Scrum, XP, and so on), which makes it possible to reduce delivery times and already involves developers and business teams. However, they are often hindered because of the non-inclusion of Ops in the same teams.

The communication and this link between Dev and Ops allows a better follow-up of end-to-end production deployments and more frequent deployments that are of higher quality, saving money for the company.

To facilitate this collaboration and to improve communication between Dev and Ops, there are several key elements in the processes that must be put in place, as shown here:

• More frequent application deployments with integration and continuous delivery (called CI/CD).
• The implementation and automation of unitary and integration tests, with a process focused on behavior-driven design (BDD) or test-driven design (TDD).
• The implementation of a means of collecting feedback from users.
• Monitoring applications and infrastructure.

The DevOps movement is based on three axes:

• The culture of collaboration: This is the very essence of DevOps – the fact that teams are no longer separated by silos specialization (one team of developers, one team of Ops, one team of testers, and so on). However, these people are brought together by making multidisciplinary teams that have the same objective: to deliver added value to the product as quickly as possible.
• Processes: To expect rapid deployment, these teams must follow development processes from agile methodologies with iterative phases that allow for better functionality, quality, and rapid feedback. These processes should not only be integrated into the development workflow with continuous integration, but also into the deployment workflow with continuous delivery and deployment. The DevOps process is divided into several phases:

A. Planning and prioritizing functionalities

B. Development

C. Continuous integration and delivery

D. Continuous deployment

E. Continuous monitoring

These phases are carried out cyclically and iteratively throughout the life of the project.

• Tools: The choice of tools and products used by teams is very important in DevOps. Indeed, when teams were separated into Dev and Ops, each team used their specific tools – deployment tools for developers and infrastructure tools for Ops – which further widened communication gaps.

With teams that bring development and operations together, and with this culture of unity, the tools that are used must be usable and exploitable by all members.

Developers need to integrate with the monitoring tools that are used by Ops teams to detect performance problems as early as possible, and with security tools provided by Ops to protect access to various resources.

Ops, on the other hand, must automate the process of creating and updating the infrastructure and integrate the code into a code manager. This is called IaC, but this can only be done in collaboration with developers who know the infrastructure that's needed for applications. Ops must also be integrated into application release processes and tools.

The following diagram illustrates the three axes of DevOps culture – the collaboration between Dev and Ops, the processes, and the use of tools:

Figure 1.1 – The DevOps culture union

So, we can go back to DevOps culture with Donovan Brown's definition (http://donovanbrown.com/post/what-is-devops):

"DevOps is the union of people, processes, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users."

The benefits of establishing a DevOps culture within an enterprise are as follows:

• Better collaboration and communication in teams, which has a human and social impact within the company
• Shorter lead times to production, resulting in better performance and end user satisfaction
• Reduced infrastructure costs with IaC
• Significant time saved with iterative cycles that reduce application errors and automation tools that reduce manual tasks, so teams focus more on developing new functionalities with added business value.

  Note

  For more information about DevOps culture and its impact on, and transformation of, enterprises, read the book The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, by Gene Kim and Kevin Behr, and The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations, by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis.

In this section, we learned about the essential notions of the DevOps culture. Now, let's look at the first practice of the DevOps culture: the implementation of CI/CD and continuous deployment.