What is DevOps?

If you’re reading this you’re probably involved in tech in some shape or form, and if you’re involved in tech you’ve probably heard about DevOps! But with so many DevOps principles, articles, and buzzwords existing- how do you know if DevOps is right for you?

Companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Microsoft rely on DevOps to increase their development speed while maintaining operational efficiency across multiple teams. The term ‘DevOps’ refers to a set of tools, practices, and philosophies that drive and speed up processes between development teams and IT teams. This concept does so by bridging the gap between development and operations teams, breaking down communication siloes while promoting collaboration through the entire product lifecycle. The ultimate goal for DevOps initiatives is to break down all communication and production siloes while promoting development speed and quality.

What makes implementing DevOps so tricky is that it cannot just be bought and enforced through new tooling and software. Successful DevOps implementation requires a cultural shift, reworking dynamics between multiple teams and stakeholders. Instead of autonomy that some teams might be used to, DevOps encourages shared responsibility and accountability, with projects being spread across different teams. 

That being said, why should you even consider DevOps in the first place, especially if you’re a startup?

The Benefits of DevOps

DevOps encourages streamlined application development and faster, more precise updates. This philosophy also pushes for organization-wide collaboration, increased team communication, and enhanced transparency and development visibility. Despite the changes needed to implement DevOps, the benefits are certainly worth it, with some examples including: 

Rapid Development Speed and Delivery

DevOps enables faster and stronger development through strong CI/CD pipelines, automation, and enhanced feedback loops. This increased rate of innovation helps create more refined applications faster while allowing development teams to respond to market changes faster as well. 

Faster development also means faster releases. DevOps enables teams to develop and innovate more frequently, resulting in more updates and less bugs. DevOps’ impact on development cycles is night and day, resulting in more refined applications with stronger updates and fewer bugs.

Increased Application Reliability and Availability

Applications built under DevOps frameworks receive frequent updates and more bug fixes, ensuring the quality of applications over time. These updates not only apply to the application itself, but also the infrastructure that it is built on. DevOps engineers constantly update their infrastructure and applications, increasing overall availability and reliability while creating an environment to deliver rapidly.

Streamlined Scaling

The DevOps philosophy is one that emphasizes integrating automation within processes that can be tedious for developers and IT teams alike. This automation aids in scaling processes throughout the entire development lifecycle, ensuring that developers and their applications can respond to traffic changes with ease. Automated scaling also lets developers focus on their core tasks rather than diverting resources on infrastructure maintenance, reducing overall operational risk.

Enhanced Security

DevOps models encourage security through automated compliance as well as a subset of DevOps called DevSecOps, with ‘sec’ representing security. DevOps processes and applications are typically built with fine-grained controls and configuration management, letting users choose exactly how they want to secure their applications. DevSecOps sees security practices being baked into the development process from the very beginning, with additional application-exclusive security providing further protection.

Stronger Collaboration

This one is a no-brainer, but with the DevOps philosophy, teams across multiple disciplines are bound to collaborate. DevOps also emphasizes concepts such as ownership and accountability, teams must work together to build and update applications as efficiently as possible.

These benefits are achieved through the implementation of the DevOps lifecycle, a continuous loop of efficient practices and frameworks that guide DevOps efforts.

DevOps Lifecycle

The DevOps lifecycle describes steps to optimize software delivery, with each step representing an automated process within the holistic development lifecycle. While the steps certainly vary between companies, the general DevOps lifecycle is comprised of eight steps:

Planning

To start, teams draw on user feedback, case studies, internal input, and other operational sources to plan for new features and functions. This step involves laying out the foundation of the next release, with the end goal being a comprehensive list of features and bug fixes.

Coding

Now that a plan is set in motion, the next step is to build the features and fix the bugs identified. Version control tools like GitHub and GitLab are crucial to this step, providing a log for code changes while enabling cross functional collaboration.

Building

New code written in the previous step is integrated into an existing code base, typically a shared repository. Here, continuous integration (CI) plays a huge role, integrating code as it is written while being scanned for issues. 

Automation within the building phase streamlines processes that developers might find bothersome, including code compiling, packaging, and testing.

Testing 

The testing phase is typically automated, with DevOps teams using this step to ensure that their applications meet set standards. Despite automated testing, this step is critical to the success of an application, with update reports being sent to QA teams to help address issues before launch.

Release

In this step, final updates are deployed and tests are run to ensure that an application is operational, not only meeting quality standards but also security and compliance standards. The application is launched into several different replicas of a production environment, with quality assurance teams and select customers testing an application before launch.

The end goal for this step is determining whether an application is ready for end-user use

Deploy

This step sees an application move to production and become accessible to users.

Operate

The operate phase sees a dedicated operations team operating their newly launched application, using observation tools to ensure that new features are running and that no new bugs are appearing.

Monitor

The last step of the DevOps lifecycle involves teams monitoring their application, collecting and analyzing user feedback to generate new features and bug fixes. This step also draws from previous workflows, generating new initiatives on how to improve the next workflow.

While monitoring might be the last step in a lifecycle, it does not mean that the DevOps initiative is over. This lifecycle is designed to be ongoing, with monitoring feeding into planning perfectly! 

Successful DevOps implementation creates a seamless lifecycle process, allowing organizations to create new applications and stronger updates. And within this ongoing lifecycle are the commonly used practices and tools that run DevOps initiatives.

DevOps Practices

The DevOps lifecycle and philosophy are only as good as the practices involved, with commonly used practices in the field including:

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are development practices that see code changes being stored and delivered for release. As the name suggests, CI/CD is comprised of two different aspects:

• Continuous Integration: developers merging code changes into a shared repository where it is automatically run and tested
• Continuous Delivery: software development practices in which code changes are automatically prepared for delivery through testing, delivers code changes to different environments once ready- also referred to as continuous deployment

These two practices are aimed at addressing bugs and reducing the time to market for software updates, ensuring quality software releases.

Microservices

On a philosophy based on accountability and collaboration, microservices are the perfect software delivery system.

The microservices architecture splits a single application into small, isolated services, allowing DevOps teams to develop simultaneously while being accountable for their individual service. Microservices also encourage development agility, letting more and more iterations be pushed out before official deployment. 

Containerization

In a similar vein to microservices, containerization sees an application and their dependencies being packaged in a small, flexible container. Organizations engage in containerization for rapid releases and streamlined management within DevOps lifecycles. Additionally, tools like Kubernetes can help in automatically deploying containerized apps, further optimizing DevOps processes.

Monitoring and Observability Tools

To aid in the operation and monitoring steps, DevOps teams use monitoring and observability tools. These tools aid in issue identification and scraping data and feedback for future updates while helping development teams respond to changes in real time.

Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as code (IaC) helps in the automation of IT infrastructure provisioning. Instead of long, traditional methods of provisioning infrastructure, developers utilize IaC software to provision infrastructure based on their desired state, with IaC tooling helping with the rest. Code replaces physical infrastructure, building a competent infrastructure in no time.

DevOps with Lyrid

With companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Netflix actively encouraging DevOps practices and working DevOps initiatives into their workflows, it’s no wonder why organizations around the world are prioritizing DevOps implementation. Successful DevOps requires a full culture shift, additional tooling, responsiveness to values like collaboration and accountability, and hands on deck from all team members.

While DevOps can be beneficial, many organizations find difficulty in implementation. While Lyrid doesn’t necessarily offer a direct replacement for DevOps within an organization, we do offer the tools that can optimize and streamline workflows.

Lyrid is an all-in-one PaaS that offers tools that are perfect within any DevOps deployment, including:

• Instant infrastructure provisioning 
• Managed Kubernetes and in-house containerization
• Microservice architecture migration
• Scalable databases and object storage

And so much more!

Looking to try your hand in DevOps for free? Visit https://app.lyrid.io/ for a free demo!