What is DevOps
DevOps, a term that comes from "development" and "operations," is the combination of practices and tools designed to increase an organization's ability to deliver applications and services faster than traditional software development processes.
This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the marketplace. Simply put, DevOps is about removing the barriers between traditionally siled teams, development, and operations. Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams work together throughout the entire software application lifecycle, from development and testing to deployment and operations.
Benefits of DevOps
Speed. DevOps methodologies enable solutions to be built at the speed necessary to innovate faster, better adapt to changing markets, and be more efficient in driving business results.
Fast deliveries. When you increase the pace of releases, you improve the product faster and create competitive advantage.
Reliability DevOps practices, such as continuous integration (continuous integration) and continuous delivery (continuous delivery/continuous deployment), ensure the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes so that they can be safely delivered at a faster rate while maintaining a great experience for end users.
Improved collaboration. Under the DevOps model, developers and operations teams collaborate closely, take responsibility, and combine their workflows. This reduces inefficiencies and saves time.
Security. The use of integrated and automated security testing tools can be adopted within the DevOps model.
Security in DevOps
DevOps security, more commonly known as DevSecOps, refers to the discipline and practice of safeguarding the entire DevOps environment through strategies, policies, processes, and technology. The DevSecOps philosophy is that security should be built into every part of the DevOps lifecycle, including startup, design, build, test, release, support, maintenance, and more.
Traditional security operates from the position that once a system has been designed, its security flaws can be determined and fixed before it is released. With the shift to a DevOps model, traditional security practices occur too late in the development cycle and are too slow for iterated software design and release. Therefore, they can become a major obstacle to the rapid delivery of applications and services.
With DevSecOps, security becomes a focus for everyone on a DevOps team. DevSecOps has the goal to implement security decisions at speed and scale without sacrificing security. DevSecOps involves continuous and flexible collaboration between release engineers and security teams.
The concepts of "speed of delivery" and "secure code creation" are merged into a simplified process. Security testing is done in iterations without slowing down delivery cycles. Critical security issues are addressed as they become apparent, not after a threat has occurred or the deployment has been compromised.
DevOps tools
DevOps practices use effective tools to support teams to facilitate rapid and reliable implementation and innovation for customers. These tools should automate manual tasks, help teams manage complex environments at scale, and keep engineers in control of the high-speed pace that is DevOps.
The DevOps workflow consists of the following phases:
- Planning the next iteration of product development or delivery
- Code Construction
- Test and deployment in the production environment
- Delivery of product updates
- Software performance monitoring and logging
- Collection of customer feedback
Planning. Task tracking and scheduling tools are needed to ensure the DevOps team knows what tasks are in progress, their progress, and if there is any risk of schedule delays. tools like Confluence y Jira they help DevOps teams achieve a smooth and efficient project management cycle and ensure timely product delivery.
Build and deliver. Developers need rapid deployment to development and test environments and can't wait long to tune code for bugs. The containerization of Docker ensures consistency across multiple development and release cycles and provides repeatable production, development, build, and test environments. Other popular tools for this phase include Kubernetes, terraform, Executive, Ansible y Puppet.
Tests. Applications like Jenkins, Circle CI y GitLab CI, which help minimize the time and effort spent on testing without compromising code quality or user experience.
Software monitoring and logging. Once the software goes into production, it needs to be monitored to ensure stable performance and higher customer satisfaction. This stage also involves analyzing and recording performance, generating smart alerts on various issues, collecting customer feedback, etc. Some tools to perform these tasks are Prometheus, grafana, Elastic (ELK) Stack, Splunk y sumo logic.
DevOps methodologies
DevOps is the direct descendant of the method of agile development, born out of the need to keep up with faster software development speed and performance agile methods. Advances in agile development highlighted the need for a more holistic approach to the software delivery lifecycle, resulting in DevOps.
"Agile development" is an umbrella term for various iterative software development methodologies, many of which have been carried over to DevOps:
Scrums: a framework in which people can address complex adaptation problems while offering products or services of the highest possible value.
Kanban: a method of managing product creation with an emphasis on continuous delivery without overloading the development team. Like Scrum, Kanban is a process designed to help teams work together more effectively.
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe): a set of workflow and organization models intended to guide companies in scaling lean and agile practices. SAFe is constantly growing with new models that seek to address the issues encountered when scaling beyond a single team.
lean development: an adaptation of the principles and practices of Lean manufacturing models to software development. Lean offers a conceptual framework, values and premises, as well as best practices derived from experience, that support agile organizations.
Extreme programming (XP): a software development methodology aimed at improving software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. XP advocates frequent releases in short development cycles, pushing as needed to improve productivity, and introducing adoptable checkpoints that are consistent with new customer requirements. Other elements of extreme programming include pair programming or thorough code review, unit testing all code, not programming functions until needed, a flat management structure, code simplicity and clarity, expecting changes in customer requirements as time goes on and the problem is better understood and frequent communication with the customer.
Characteristics and advantages of DevOps practices and processes
Several key practices can help organizations innovate faster by automating and streamlining the software development management process.
A fundamental DevOps practice is to make small but very frequent updates. These updates are typically more incremental than updates made under traditional release practices. Organizations using a DevOps model deploy updates much more frequently than organizations using traditional software development practices.
La communication and collaboration are cornerstones of the DevOps set of practices. Automating the software delivery process establishes collaboration by physically bringing together development and operations workflows and responsibilities. Communication between developers, operations, and even other teams such as marketing and sales allows all parts of the organization to more closely align on goals and projects.
DevOps practices such as continuous integration and continuous delivery enable DevOps teams to deliver quickly, safely, and securely. Monitoring and logging help DevOps teams track application performance so they can quickly react to issues.
Microservices
Microservices architecture is a design approach to building a single application as a set of small services. Each service runs in its own process and communicates with other services through a well-defined interface using a lightweight mechanism. Different frameworks or programming languages can be used to write microservices and implement them independently, as a single service, or as a group of services.
Organizations can also use a microservices architecture to make their applications more flexible and enable faster innovation. Typically, each service relies on a small, agile team that takes care of the service.
Continuous integration and continuous delivery
DevOps practices, such as continuous integration (continuous integration) and continuous delivery (continuous delivery/continuous deployment), also abbreviated as CI/CD, enable DevOps teams to deliver quickly, safely, and securely.
CI is a software building practice in which developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository, followed by automated builds and tests. CI's key goals are to find and fix bugs faster, improve software quality, and reduce the time it takes to validate and release new software updates.
CD expands on CI by deploying all code changes to a test or production environment after the build stage.
Monitoring and Tracking
By capturing and analyzing logs generated by applications, DevOps teams can better understand how software changes or updates may affect users.
Summary
Integrating the DevOps and DevSecOps model into the organization is not a destination. It is a journey.
DevOps is fundamentally changing the way development and operations are done. DevOps practices, process, frameworks, and workflow, based on its philosophy, can be used to build security into your software development lifecycle at speed and scale without sacrificing security, while minimizing security costs. risks, ensures compliance, and reduces friction and costs. DevOps and DevSecOps enable development, operations, and security teams to balance security and compliance with speed of delivery, and build security into the entire SDLC.
Do you use any other DevOps tools? Do you have experiences with these that you can share?
