DevOps – Shaping the future of software development life cycles

Since its inception, software development has always comprised of the development team and the operations team. The development team is responsible for coming up with a design plan to build the system from scratch, whereas the operations team tests and implements the system built by the development team. Based on these tests the operations team releases feedback to the development team regarding bug fixing and other changes required to make the system better. 

However, having two separately functioning teams (development and operations) meant there was a lot of idle time which led to timelines extending past their original dates and delays in the overall software development life cycle (SFDC). The lack of communication often led to disparities between both teams. The development team would often be in the middle of working on the next project when they get feedback on the previous code from the operations team. The consequence was a lot of operational inefficiencies that could delay projects by months on end. This is how the concept of DevOps came about – a new cycle of software development that incorporated development and operations into the same SDFC. 

A DevOps learning path is an option many organizations seem to be interested in exploring. A DevOps tutorial for beginners such as Hero Vired’s Certificate Program in DevOps and Cloud Engineering  can go a long way for beginners in the space as it provides you with introductory DevOps training and a valuable DevOps certification upon completion.

Role of DevOps team

The DevOps approach brings these two teams together and allows them to break the walls of miscommunication and work in collaboration with each other. It is a process of continuously improving efficiency. This approach allows companies to adapt faster to updates and development changes, allowing them to deliver on deployment in a more consistent manner. 

Making the transition to DevOps may be challenging at first, and require a few knowledge sharing sessions to get things going, but once you iron these kinks out, the streamlined flow between teams makes the software development life cycle much more efficient. For a company to successfully transition into a DevOps approach, having the right skills and soft skills as well as a willingness to collaborate are pivotal. 

Key Roles in a DevOps approach 

There are a few critical roles that a company needs to have in place if they want to successfully adopt a DevOps approach. People are the most important component of the equation and matching the right technical skills and soft skills to these key roles is what makes a successful DevOps team.

• The DevOps Evangelist: This is the leader who owns and delivers the change for your company to evolve into a DevOps approach. It is their responsibility to be the change agent and promote the tangible benefits of DevOps to both the development and operations team. The changes in technical roles are bound to lead to initial failures, but it is the DevOps Evangelist’s responsibility to rally behind them and induce a culture that encourages improving quickly to address IT challenges.

• The Automation Architect: It is the automation architect’s job to design, analyze, and implement strategies that ensure automated systems are available for continuous deployments. Since DevOps heavily relies on automated systems it is critical for the automation architect to provide a reliable automated environment that is free of bottlenecks. 

• The Software Developer: Since code is at the core of processes, you need to have people with the right skill to develop a strong core for your DevOps organization. DevOps software developers require a high degree of flexibility with both their development tool set, as well as the programming languages and development strategies they are familiar with. To maintain product quality developers also need to facilitate automated testing and monitor the code constantly. 

• The Security Engineer: Currently teams are taking one more step further, integrating cybersecurity into the development cycle as well, moving from DevOps to DevSecOps. Security engineers need to have a thorough understanding of DevOps and cybersecurity to put in place the best practices for application and infrastructure security. They need to be well-versed with risk assessment techniques, threat modeling, and code reviews among other skills to be able to resolve security problems and ensure the design of the code is secure. Working in a DevOps or DevSecOps structure allows them to give recommendations to developers on the fly.

• The Code Release Manager: The code release manager plays the role of project manager in a DevOps model and works on managing and coordinating the product right from development through production. They tend to focus on the more technical details and oversee integration testing and flow of development to support the end-to-end application delivery tool chain.

• The Experience Assurance Expert: Similar to quality assurance, the experience assurance expert is tied to the customer experience and ensures it is easy to use. Their job is to test the new features and functions outlined in the original specifications to make sure it creates a smooth user experience of the final product. Rather than just ensuring quality they need to ensure that using the product is an enjoyable experience for their consumers.
• The Utility Technology Player: A DevOps approach requires system administrators that are not only well-versed with IT operations but can also collaborate with developers and reduce the areas of friction in the workflow that happen while deploying code in the software development life cycle. The DevOps mode of operation requires a lot of quality assurance in a staging environment and the technology player also needs to be involved in the post-production systems.

The ideal DevOps approach would need all these roles to work together and create a collaborative environment for each product they work on right from development through deployment and monitoring. The synergy between these roles will be make or break for the transition into a DevOps approach, but once you get the formula down, you will be able to get high quality products and applications to the market in a shorter span of time. Equipping yourself with the best DevOps certification that gives you a DevOps tutorial for beginners will allow you to integrate into the new system smoothly.

How does DevOps work?

The aforementioned roles use set of tools to collaborate and implement a DevOps approach over several phases: 

• Planning phase: After studying the needs of the customer the development team pens down a plan of action for the project after establishing the application objectives they need to deliver to the customer.

• Coding phase: The development team proceeds to work on the original code and stores different versions of the code in a repository through tools like Git and GitHub that facilitate version control by allowing you to merge them when needed.

• Build phase: Tools like Maven and Grade make the code executable in this phase.

• Bug testing phase: Once the code has been built it goes through a series of automated and manual tests using tools like Selenium before being sent to the operations team for deployment.

• Deployment phase: The operations team then deploy the code into the working environment using tools like Kubernetes and Ansible to automate these phases.

• Monitoring phase: Once launched into the working environment the product is continuously monitored using automated tools like Nagios.

• Integration phase: The feedback received from monitoring is looped back to the development team to work on the planning phase. Jenkins is the tool used for sending the code for building and testing making the continuous integration of the DevOps model a reality. 

The continuous integration and the smooth flow of information between development and operations is what allows organizations to stick to, and even speed up their timelines. DevOps online training like our Certificate Program in DevOps and Cloud Engineering  DevOps course is the ideal DevOps tutorial for beginners looking to familiarize themselves with a DevOps engineer course.

What are the benefits of using DevOps?

Now that you know all the pieces of the puzzle in terms of the tools that are used and the team that needs to onboarded, let’s take a look at what happens when at all comes together:

• Accelerated innovation: Companies practicing a DevOps approach have been shown to spend less time on customer support issues, customer identified effects, and remediational security issues. The time saved in these areas are used for working on innovative new ideas and allows them to be more adaptive and flexible to the market, keeping them a step ahead of their competitors. By accelerating innovation, you can deliver better products at a faster time through a much more engaging process, resulting in happier customers. 

• Increased productivity: Companies using DevOps boast a much higher revenue growth rate, and also score higher on customer satisfaction, brand perception, and talent management. 

• Accelerated deployment: According to DORA’s state of DevOps report, elite performers in DevOps can deploy code as much as 208 times more frequently compared to companies that don’t use DevOps. It allows you to create more features and deploy them faster as well. Being continuously integrated makes DevOps products a lot less likely to fail, and on the off chance that they fail, DevOps teams can resolve these issues quickly. 

• Optimized security: DevSecOps operates with a security first mindset and makes it a point to educate the people of the organization. Using a secure software development life cycle and processes like thread modeling and code reviews help make operations more reliable in terms of security. Rigorous product testing such as SAST, DAST, and release automation also makes the products more secure. 

DevOps irrefutably helps improve software development and operations to make a better quality of life for your organization and employees. It has many proven cases of increasing the speed, efficiency, and quality of software delivery by manifold. Familiarizing yourself with DevOps training is critical as it is only a matter of time before DevOps becomes the standard way of software development and operations.

Hero Vired’s Certificate Program in DevOps and Cloud Engineering is an industry-acclaimed DevOps for beginners course that equips you with skills and cloud tools you need to automate the application development life cycle on secure & robust cloud infrastructure and obtain a DevOps certification. Become a certified DevOps & Cloud Engineer.

Our DevOps course is designed for anyone with coding experience to learn and explore the techniques of automating tasks and needs throughout the software development life cycle. You will learn to build DevOps and Cloud solutions to automate the code assembly, testing, and deployment using AWS and various other software tools such as Ansible, Selenium, Py-test, Jenkins, Nagios, Git, GitHub, etc.

The program gives you the fundamental knowledge and skill to design, configure, and deploy secure and robust cloud storage infrastructure in the various phases of a DevOps approach. 

You will learn how to use collaborative coding techniques by using version control systems and tools used in the DevOps pipeline.