Unity has power!! Well, we all must have heard this saying once in our lifetime. That’s because it works in almost every phase of life, whether personal or professional. The same goes for DevOps, where two departments come together: development & operations, for better stimulation of tasks & responsibilities. DevOps is not a tool, software, or not programming language you can learn or work with. DevOps is an evolving mindset and philosophy that enables better application development and quicker release of new or revised software features to customers.

Whether you are a full stack development agency or any other business unit, the DevOps cycle enables a streamlined and regular flow of integration, communication, collaboration, transparency, and visibility between the IT operations team and development teams’ counterparts.

DevOps platform includes every single step from planning to coding, building, testing, and release phases to deployment, processes, and continuous monitoring. This relationship induces a constant customer feedback loop for further modifications. 

In Short, We can say, DevOps works on four significant aspects “culture, automation, measurement, and sharing (CAMS)”.

Advantages of DevOps

In the Modern Era, By adopting DevOps, a company can benefit from various aspects. Let’s have a quick look at a few:

Quicker deployment

It ensures faster and more continuous delivery of new updates and features, which leads to customer satisfaction & brand credibility.

Balanced work environment

The stress involved in launching new features, updates, and fixes can affect the workspace stability and decrease overall productivity to a great extent. DevOps approach can manage this situation effectively.

Substantial improvement in product quality

Coordination between operation and development teams can significantly improve product quality by getting continued customer feedback.

Automation boost innovation

DevOps has more significant benefits than traditional models as it helps detect and fix problems fast & accurately. As the defects are frequently tested through the automation process, the team gets more time to develop new ideas.

Ongoing delivery of software

In the DevOps framework, all divisions are responsible for maintaining equilibrium and presenting new features & ideas. Therefore, software delivery speed is quick and undisturbed, unlike the traditional method.

Quick and dedicated problem-solving techniques

Providing a fast and long-lasting solution to technological errors in software management is one of the significant benefits of DevOps.

Transparency encourages more productivity

Incorporating transparency makes the whole process easier to communicate among the team members, making them more concentrated in their specialized fields. 

Less cost of production

With proper coordination, DevOps helps reduce your departments’ management and production costs, as maintenance and new updates are brought under a broader umbrella.

Basic DevOps Principles:

Cooperation between teams

The fundamental belief behind DevOps is teamwork. Development and operations teams merge into a functioning team that intercommunicates, shares feedback, and cooperates throughout the development and deployment cycle. 

This process leads to more full-stack development, where teams own the entire backend-to-frontend responsibilities of a feature or product. From ideation to delivery, teams own the project entirely. It leads to optimum output & productivity.

Advanced Automation

An essential technique of DevOps is to automate the software development lifecycle as much as possible. It allows developers more time to write codes and generate new features. Automation is a crucial element of a CI/CD pipeline, decreasing human errors and increasing team productivity. It also enables a quicker response to customer feedback quickly.

Continuous Improvement

Here, Continuous improvement means minimizing waste, continuous experimentation, and optimizing for speed, cost, and ease of delivery. Continuous improvement is also connected to continuous delivery permitting DevOps teams to push updates that improve software systems’ efficiency regularly. 

Customer-centric approach

DevOps teams use short feedback from customers and end-users to create products and services specific to user needs. DevOps techniques allow fast collection and response to user feedback via real-time monitoring and quick deployment. 

Deep Understanding of Product

This principle revolves around understanding customers’ requirements and developing products or services that solve real problems. Teams should not build software based on assumptions about how customers will use the software. Instead, DevOps teams should have a holistic understanding of the product, from creation to implementation.

DevOps Best Practices To Follow

In creating a collaborative culture whole point of DevOps is to enhance collaboration and eliminate miscommunication & gaps between development and operations teams. This way, the software can be developed and delivered to customers quickly. In DevOps, these practices become a part of everyone’s responsibilities irrespective of their distinct roles in the team.

Prioritize customer satisfaction 

Whether using the classic waterfall model or an entire DevOps approach, the goal is to satisfy customer expectations. DevOps offers you the ability to simplify the release process. Understanding your customers’ perspectives is key to a successful DevOps approach.

Employ agile project management.

Agile is a sequential project management technique that helps software engineering teams perform higher-quality projects quickly & efficiently. With the DevOps approach, it becomes quite easier to go agile.

Adopt continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD)

Continuous Integration (CI) is a core DevOps best technique for merging code modifications from various contributors into a central repository. CI allows developers to integrate code changes frequently and use automated tools to test the code’s accuracy.

Monitor the right metrics

Regular monitoring of performance is another DevOps best technique. To measure the effectiveness of a DevOps approach, do not forget to track the right performance metrics, such as mean time to detect, lead time, and issue severity.

Use the proper tools.

Automation is the heart of a successful DevOps approach. Automating the process of testing, building, and releasing software make life easier for both developers and operations engineers who collaborate in a DevOps organization.

Switch to microservices

Microservices architecture is the technique of creating a single application as a set of small services. It’s dissimilar from traditional monolithic architecture, where the access codes and UI are integrated into a single program. Microservices fit into the DevOps practice of splitting large, complicated projects into smaller parts. With this, it becomes pretty easy for different services to work independently without impacting the whole system.

Microservices also help in other DevOps approaches such as continuous delivery and integration, assuring fast and stable deployment.

Some Best DevOps Tools 

GitHub: Github is believed to be one of the world’s biggest and most refined development platforms. Millions of developers and companies develop, craft, and maintain their software on GitHub. Some of its significant features are:

• Automation 
• Collective Coding
• Security with added features
• Project Management

Bitbucket: Bitbucket is a top-rated platform having over 10 million registered users. Although it is a medium for hosting code, it goes farther than just code management. Teams can plan assignments, make coordination on code, test, and deploy from a single tool. Following are a few significant features of it:

• Integrated CI/CD to test, build, and deploy.
• Tighter Jira and Trello integration.
• Keep your code safe in the Cloud with IP-safe listing and 2-step verification.

GitLab: It is a 360-degree DevOps Tool for quick software delivery. It enables teams to perform all tasks, from Planning to SCM to Delivery to Monitoring and Security. Let’s have a quick look at a few of its features:

• Single UI, single discussion thread, and single data store to manage projects effectively.
• CI/CD for scalable, robust, and end-to-end automation to work together effectively.
• Built-in functionality for Automated Security, Code Quality, and Susceptibility management & with strict governance, your DevOps pace never slows down.

Datadog: Datadog is a SaaS-based DevOps platform with hybrid cloud environments for server and app monitoring. It enables tracking of Docker containers as well. A few of its important features are: 

• Smoothly aggregates metrics and events across the entire DevOps stack.
• Provide end-to-end UX visibility in a single tool by prioritizing business decisions.

Conclusion

Now, when you know what DevOps can do for your business, you should follow the approach in order to get things done appropriately. Also, to get the desired results, it is important to understand which of these tools & technologies best suits your business needs. Development & Operations teams also play an equally important role. 

Still confused? Which application should you opt for? 

No worries, let ForceBolt help you to guide in this decision better.