What Is DevOps?

Understanding DevOps

DevOps is that silent hero bridging the gap between speedy development of innovative products and IT operations to ensure that the business wins every time. It’s not just a buzzword, but is rather a transformative approach that is reshaping how we build and deliver software. In fact, according to research by Global Markets Insight, the DevOps market is expected to expand by 20% CAGR from 2023 to 2032 to be worth more than $70 billion. This demand is driven by the urgent requirement to reduce the time taken to develop software and the time-to-market.

In the application release process at IT firms, the development department is primarily responsible for designing, coding, and building the applications. And, the operations department manages servers, ensures security, oversees scaling, and maintains backups within the business system. DevOps software development method integrates and streamlines development (Dev) and operations (Ops) workflows to improve collaboration and productivity.

In this article, we’ll learn the A-Zs of DevOps and understand why engaging with a devops service provider will benefit your business.. Read on to know about the best practices and how you can leverage DevOps principles in the best way possible.

The DevOps Culture

DevOps Practices and Methodologies

DevOps Automation

DevOps automation entails using tools, technologies, and processes to automate various stages of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and the operations workflow. It’s the secret sauce that eliminates manual, repetitive tasks and supercharges efficiency at every level.

DevOps automation encompasses infrastructure provisioning, code compilation and testing, deployment, monitoring, and more. Organisations can achieve faster, more reliable software delivery through automation. According to the Global State of IT Automation 2024, 82% of respondents are looking forward to updating or expanding their IT automation tools.
Automation, in turn, helps them stay competitive and responsive to market demands. That’s not all. The hidden benefit is that DevOps automation allows to include more strategic work by freeing time. This way, one can focus on other things, such as enhancing features and improving user experience. That’s what sells, after all!

Continuous Feedback and Improvement:

Measuring DevOps Success

Like any other software, several metrics can be regarded as the industry standard for evaluating the success of software delivery in an organisation. These can be your secret weapons to quickly spotting bottlenecks that may be slowing down your delivery process. Identifying errors in deployed code that cause failures also becomes much easier.

The insights provided by DevOps metrics are data-driven, which can help you improve continuously and deliver more value to your customers.

DORA, Google’s DevOps Research and Assessment team, has identified four key metrics, briefly discussed below, along with the other seven metrics, to help you measure your team’s performance improvement.

• Deployment Frequency: Have you ever wondered how often you deploy new features and fixes? The frequency of deployments, or deployment frequency, is among the defining metrics in DevOps. It helps understand how quickly an organisation can deliver the promised value to its customers. Here’s a breakdown of deployment frequency based on performance levels:
• Elite Teams: Achieve on-demand deployments, meaning their software is constantly in a releasable state and ideally deployed daily. This signifies a highly agile and low-risk development process.
• High-Performing Teams: Deploy frequently, potentially several times a week. Smaller deployments minimise risk and enable continuous delivery, allowing quicker feedback and iteration.
• Low-Performing Teams: Deploy infrequently, with significant releases happening over months. This approach can hinder velocity and significantly increase the impact of deployment failures.

The Benefits of Frequent Deployments:

• Reduced Risk: Smaller deployments help minimise the potential damage that bugs or errors can cause. In case of an issue, it becomes easier to identify and fix it within a smaller codebase.
• Faster Feedback: Frequent deployments allow quicker user feedback, enabling teams to iterate and improve features rapidly.
• Increased Agility: The ability to deploy frequently empowers teams to adapt to changing requirements and market demands more readily.

How to Increase Your Deployment Frequency:

• Shrink Deployment Size: Focus on releasing a single feature or change at a time rather than bundling multiple features into large deployments. This minimises the complexity and risk associated with each deployment.
• Automate Testing: Implement automated testing processes to ensure the quality and functionality of your code before each deployment. This streamlines the deployment process and frees up team resources.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Utilizing IaC tools to automate infrastructure provisioning and configuration ensures consistent environments and helps simplify the deployment process.

These strategies can help you move towards a frequent deployment model, enabling faster delivery, reducing risk, and ultimately providing a competitive edge.

Below are some other metrics that can help you evaluate DevOps success:

Lead Time for Changes: Lead time is a crucial metric for DevOps. It refers to the timeframe needed for a bug fix or the latest feature to move from your code to the actual product used by customers. This lead time should be as short as possible because shorter lead times signify a more efficient workflow. You need to optimise your processes and tools continuously. This way, you can strive to achieve these shorter lead times, ultimately leading to a more efficient and responsive development cycle.

Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR): Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) is another important metric in DevOps. Remember that a low MTTR signifies a more robust and resilient system. Focus on building strong systems and implementing effective recovery procedures; we can strive for a lower MTTR. This translates to less user disruption and ensures our systems’ stability and reliability.

Change Failure Rate: Ideally, every change you make to the code should translate into a working feature or fix in production. However, sometimes it may not happen.

The change failure rate, which reflects the percentage of changes that lead to production issues, measures the change of failure. You’d want this rate to be as low as possible. A lower change failure rate indicates higher quality code and more reliable deployments. One can strive for a lower change failure rate by focusing on rigorous DevOps test practices and maintaining a culture of code quality.

Focusing on these critical areas gives you a holistic view of your DevOps success. Remember, DevOps is a journey, not a destination. Use these metrics to identify areas for improvement and continuously refine your practices to deliver even greater value.

DevOps and Organizational Change

By now, you would have understood that DevOps is not limited to simple practices and tools for operations and development teams. It goes beyond that, enabling organisations to understand the importance of changing management to ensure a DevOps successful implementation.

Before getting into the best practices and examples of implementing organisational change management in DevOps, let us have a look at the benefits related to the same:

• Fewer crashes: By planning changes carefully, there’s less risk of something going wrong and causing downtime.
• Teamwork makes the dream work: Everyone involved (like the drivers and mechanics) is on the same page about what’s happening, so they can work together effectively.
• Following the rules: Change management helps ensure everything stays compliant and above board.
• Learning from experience: By tracking changes, the team can see what worked well and what didn’t, which helps them improve for next time.
• Adapting on the fly: When the race (or business needs) change, the pit crew (or DevOps team) can adjust their routine to keep up.

Here, we have discussed some best practices for implementing organisational change management in DevOps:

• Clear Communication: Just like the pit crew needs to know exactly what’s happening during a stop, the importance of strong communication between development and operations teams (think drivers and mechanics) cannot be overstated. Chat apps, video calls, and DevOps collaboration software can keep everyone informed.

• DevOps Mindset: As reiterated several times, DevOps is primarily about teamwork! A DevOps culture is rooted in DevOp collaboration, automation, and constantly learning from experiences. It means encouraging experimentation and innovation and being open to improvement. 

• Executive Buy-in: The team owner (executives) must see the value of a good pit crew (DevOps). Build a strong business case demonstrating DevOps’s benefits, like faster deployments and fewer crashes. Keep them engaged and show them how DevOps helps the organisation win the race.

• Continuous Improvement: The best pit crews constantly refine their routine based on experience. In DevOps, this means having a culture of constant improvement. Review processes regularly, monitor performance, and gather feedback to identify areas for improvement. Embrace automation and data analysis to learn from mistakes and make adjustments based on what works and what doesn’t. This keeps your software running at peak performance.

Now let us understand it better with the help of some examples given below:

A, Speeding Up Pit Stops (CI/CD)
Imagine constantly improving your pit stop routine. Change management helps plan and automate these “mini-changes” to make them smoother and faster, getting the car (your.) back on track quicker.

Read more about the five best CI/CD tools for your team here.

B. Building with Blueprints (Infrastructure as Code)
Think of your car’s design. Change management ensures everyone follows the exact blueprint (code) when building or fixing parts of the vehicle (infrastructure). This reduces errors and keeps everything consistent.

C. Adapting on the Fly (Agile Development)
The race (business needs) can change. Change management helps your pit crew (team) adapt their routine quickly by working together in short bursts and incorporating feedback to keep the car (software) running smoothly.

D. Talking it Out (ChatOps)
Clear communication is critical during a pit stop. Change management encourages using chat tools to keep everyone informed and resolve issues faster, getting the car back in the race sooner.

E. Keeping an Eye on the Engine (Monitoring and Analytics)
Monitoring the car’s vitals (system performance) is important for the entire process. Change management helps establish clear guidelines for tracking these vitals and fixing any problems that arise quickly, keeping the car running smoothly.

Security in DevOps

As discussed previously, organisations often have separate departments for software development and IT operations. These teams working independently may create challenges when integrating new features or fixing bugs.

Enter DevOps as the bridge between the two. DevOps promotes collaboration between development and operations by opening up mandatory communication throughout the entire software development lifecycle (DevOps SLDC). Developers write code with the needs of IT operations in mind, ensuring features are robust and function smoothly and securely for the end users.

With DevOps, it is now possible to ensure that new features and bug fixes can be released more frequently in smaller increments. This continuous delivery approach, facilitated by DevSecOps minimises disruption to business operations. Additionally, security is a core consideration from the beginning, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities in the final product. In the face of growing threats from data breaches, more and more companies are seen adopting DevSecOps to achieve agile development techniques with improved security. According to DataBridge Market Research, the DevSecOps market is expected to reach $23.16 billion by 2029, translating to nearly 31.5% CAGR 2022-2029.

Overall, DevOps creates a more streamlined and efficient software development process. By working together, development and IT teams can deliver a faster, more reliable, and ultimately more secure software experience for everyone involved.

Learn more about DevSecOps here.

Scaling DevOps: Growing Your Practices

DevOps agile software development is fantastic for streamlining development and operations, but what happens when your organisation grows? Here’s how to effectively scale your DevOps practices, with a strong emphasis on fostering collaboration DevOps across all teams:

• Embrace Automation:

Repetition is the enemy of scaling. To avoid this, you must automate everything you can, from infrastructure provisioning to testing and deployment. This frees up your team to focus on more strategic initiatives.

• Focus on Smaller Deployments:

Break down significant feature releases into smaller, more manageable chunks. This minimises risk and allows for faster feedback loops, ensuring a smoother delivery process.

• Invest in Monitoring and Analytics:

Implementing powerful monitoring tools to track performance metrics can be one way to identify potential bottlenecks. This allows you to address issues proactively and helps optimise your DevOps pipeline.

• Cultivating a Culture of Collaboration:

It is now a fact that DevOps thrives on teamwork. Encourage open communication between development, operations, and other teams. 

You can use some tips for ensuring collaboration across departments:

DevOps Leadership and Governance

Some organisations believe that DevOps is best used to speed up the process. While it is a powerful approach for streamlining software development (DevOps SLDC), speed shouldn’t come at the expense of control. The key to maximising your DevOps investment lies in understanding the importance of DevOps governance. This framework establishes responsible practices, ensuring your organisation gets the full benefits of a agile software development and DevOps process.

Here are some examples of the same:

• Promotes Risk Awareness: New initiatives always carry some risk. DevOps governance helps everyone involved understand potential problems and how to mitigate them. This fosters collaboration and ensures controls are seen as safeguards, not roadblocks.
• Improves Compliance: Every industry has regulations to follow. DevOps governance helps ensure your DevOps practices align with those regulations. This includes automating processes and change management to minimise compliance risks.
• Secures Development: Governance establishes precise access controls. Developers and testers can only access the necessary resources, reducing the risk of unauthorised changes or security breaches.
• Eases Code Management: Continuous delivery can lead to errors. DevOps governance promotes the “Cleanroom model,” which ensures proper tracking and monitoring of code changes. This prevents the introduction of bugs or security vulnerabilities.

Most organisations are realising the importance of DevOps and are incorporating it into their systems. But to truly succeed, organisations need to balance the benefits of speed with proper controls. DevOps governance is quintessential for maximising return on investment and ensuring your development process is secure and compliant.