What is DevOps?

As you know, software development and operations were traditionally handled by separate teams with distinct roles and responsibilities. Developers focused on writing code and creating new features, while operations teams focused on deploying and managing the software in production environments. This separation often led to communication gaps, slow release cycles, and inefficient processes.

DevOps bridges the gap between development and operations by promoting a culture of collaboration, shared responsibilities, and continuous feedback using automation throughout the software development life cycle.

It is a set of principles and practices, as well as a philosophy, that encourage the participation of the development and operations teams in the entire software development life cycle, including software maintenance and operations. To implement this, organizations manage several processes and tools that help automate the software delivery process to improve speed and agility, reduce the cycle time of code release through continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and monitor the applications running in production.

A DevOps team should ensure that instead of having a clear set of siloed groups that do development, operations, and QA, they have a single team that takes care of the entire SDLC life cycle – that is, the team will build, deploy, and monitor the software. The combined team owns the whole application instead of certain functions. That does not mean that people don’t have specialties, but the idea is to ensure that developers know something about operations and that operations engineers know something about development. The QA team works hand in hand with developers and operations engineers to understand the business requirements and various issues faced in the field. Based on these learnings, they need to ensure that the product they are developing meets business requirements and addresses problems encountered in the field.

In a traditional development team, the source of the backlog is the business and its architects. However, for a DevOps team, there are two sources of their daily backlog – the business and its architects and the customers and issues that they face while they’re operating their application in production. Therefore, instead of following a linear path of software delivery, DevOps practices generally follow an infinity loop, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 1.1 – DevOps infinity loop

To ensure smooth interoperability between people of different skill sets, DevOps focuses heavily on automation and tools. DevOps aims to ensure that we try to automate repeatable tasks as much as possible and focus on more important things. This ensures product quality and speedy delivery. DevOps focuses on people, processes, and tools, giving the most importance to people and the least to tools. We generally use tools to automate processes that help people achieve the right goals.

Some of the fundamental ideas and jargon that a DevOps engineer generally encounters are as follows. We are going to focus heavily on each throughout this book:

• Continuous integration (CI)

CI is a software development practice that involves frequently merging code changes from multiple developers into a shared repository, typically several times a day. This ensures that your developers regularly merge code into a central repository where automated builds and tests run to provide real-time feedback to the team. This reduces cycle time significantly and improves the quality of code. This process aims to minimize bugs within the code early within the cycle rather than later during the test phases. It detects integration issues early and ensures that the software always remains in a releasable state.

• Continuous delivery (CD)

CD is all about shipping your tested software into your production environment whenever it is ready. So, a CD pipeline will build your changes into packages and run integration and system tests on them. Once you have thoroughly tested your code, you can automatically (or on approval) deploy changes to your test and production environments. So, CD aims to have the latest set of tested artifacts ready to deploy.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

IaC is a practice in software development that involves managing and provisioning infrastructure resources, such as servers, networks, and storage, using code and configuration files rather than manual processes. IaC treats infrastructure as software, enabling teams to define and manage infrastructure resources in a programmable and version-controlled manner. With the advent of virtual machines, containers, and the cloud, technology infrastructure has become virtual to a large extent. This means we can build infrastructure through API calls and templates. With modern tools, we can also build infrastructure in the cloud declaratively. This means that you can now build IaC, store the code needed to build the infrastructure within a source code repository such as Git, and use a CI/CD pipeline to spin and manage the infrastructure.

• Configuration as code (CaC)

CaC is a practice in software development and system administration that involves managing and provisioning configuration settings using code and version control systems. It treats configuration settings as code artifacts, enabling teams to define, store, and manage configuration in a programmatic and reproducible manner. Historically, servers used to be built manually from scratch and seldom changed. However, with elastic infrastructure in place and an emphasis on automation, the configuration can also be managed using code. CaC goes hand in hand with IaC for building scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure so that your application can run seamlessly.

• Monitoring and logging

Monitoring and logging are essential practices in software development and operations that involve capturing and analyzing data about the behavior and performance of software applications and systems. They provide insights into the software’s health, availability, and performance, enabling teams to identify issues, troubleshoot problems, and make informed decisions for improvement. Monitoring and logging come under observability, which is a crucial area for any DevOps team – that is, knowing when your application has issues and exceptions using monitoring and triaging them using logging. These practices and tools form your eye, and it is a critical area in the DevOps stack. In addition, they contribute a lot to building the backlog of a DevOps team.

• Communication and collaboration

Communication and collaboration are crucial aspects of DevOps practices. They promote effective teamwork, knowledge sharing, and streamlined workflows across development, operations, and other stakeholders involved in the software delivery life cycle. Communication and collaboration make a DevOps team function well. Gone are the days when communication used to be through emails. Instead, modern DevOps teams manage their backlog using ticketing and Agile tools, keep track of their knowledge articles and other documents using a wiki, and communicate instantly using chat and instant messaging (IM) tools.

While these are just a few core aspects of DevOps practices and tools, there have been recent changes with the advent of containers and the cloud – that is, the modern cloud-native application stack. Now that we’ve covered a few buzzwords in this section, let’s understand what we mean by the cloud and cloud computing.