What is DevOps and why do we need it?

There are many buzzwords in the IT industry that a newbie programmer encounters and gets confused about that word, and “DevOps” is one of them. In this article, we will talk about what DevOps really is and why we do even need it, the DevOps life-cycle, the tools used in DevOps, etc.

Let’s dive in.

What is DevOps?

Patrick Debois is considered one of the first DevOps advocates to introduce the DevOps culture to the world.

In 2009, he introduced DevOps to the world at the “DevOps day event.”

It is not a tool, software, or programming language in itself.

It is majorly a set of practices, tools, and cultural changes.

DevOps joins development and operation teams to work as a single team in the application development process.

This partnership between the development and operation teams breaks the communication barrier between both sides and results in healthier cooperation between the two sides.

That will eventually result in an overall faster speed of development and maintenance.

Some big companies using DevOps include TCS, Walmart, Meta, etc.

DevOps working

With the help of DevOps, the development team and the operations team merged. It helps us speed up the entire process, from development to testing to deployment and management.

Some advantages of DevOps –

• Increases application development speed
• Increases collaboration between employees
• Automate many processes

It results in a significant increase in the speed and quality of our desired product.

DevOps tells us to automate our processes as much as possible because it saves us time.

What is the DevOps life cycle?

1. Planning:-  we gather all the needs of our customers and plan our application development according to the requirements.
2. Coding:- we choose the required programming language and other tools and then code the application using them, push the code to version control tools like git.
3. Build:- We can automate the code compilation and build using tools such as maven and Gradle.
4. Testing:- Now that we have built our application, it’s time to do testing to find potential bugs and errors before we deploy it to the server. Selenium is one of the commonly used tools for testing our code.
5. Deployment:- After building and testing our application, it’s time to deploy it over a server for visitors to use our application. Some well-known deployment tools used in DevOps are Capistrano, Jenkins, juju, etc.
6. Operate:- At this stage, the operations team whether the visitors are facing any issues using the application. Some commonly used tools at this stage are Jira, Kubernetes, Docker, etc.
7. Monitoring:- Now that users are using our application, we monitor our application regularly to find out any server issues or network issues. Tools used in monitoring our application are Nagios and Splunk.

The feedback received after all these stages go back to the planning phase.

The development team will fix the error or roll out a new feature according to the feedback received, and this whole cycle goes on again.

The development team will fix the error or roll out a new feature according to the feedback received, and this whole cycle goes on again.

This continuous integration and development (CI/CD) is the core feature of DevOps.

Why do we need DevOps?

During the development of a small application or website, a single person can manage everything from development to testing to deployment; and the website or application will be readily available for visitors to operate.

On the other hand, talking about mid-sized or big companies like Netflix or Amazon, there are mainly two teams working on the application. These are the development team and the operations team.

The primary responsibility of the development team is to write code, add new features, etc. This team is usually also comprised of testers.

The developer team develops an application and tests it. Then hand it on to the operations team.

On the other hand, the operations team’s primary responsibility is to deploy the application on a server, manage the application, deal with scaling issues, manage security and backups, etc.

While the development team updates the application to a newer version by adding some features or fixing bugs and errors, they send it to the operations team to deploy it on the server.

It could be possible that the operations team was handling the scalability issue or dealing with any other issue at that time.

So the deployment of the update given by the development team got delayed. The development team may think that the operations team is doing nothing and they are the ones doing all the hard work.

When the manager or any higher official comes and asks about the update, the development team and the operations team will blame each other.

It can cause conflicts between the two, as there is a lack of communication between the development and the operations team.

DevOps helps companies to break this barrier and make two teams collaborate and work as a single entity.

Eventually, this will increase the development speed and quality of the application.

Conclusion

This article overviews DevOps, its application, its impact on the organization, the development speed of the application, etc.

You can use Codedamn to learn DevOps. The DevOps course is coming soon.