DevOps is a term used to describe an evolution of existing IT best practices from ITIL, Lean and Agile into a development and operations approach that supports automation and continuous delivery and encourages a culture of collaboration and learning to help IT deliver business value better, faster, and cheaper than ever before.
DevOps is:
DevOps is Not:
Digital Transformation is a profound transformation that encompasses all organizational activities, processes, skills, and cultural attitudes. It may be demanding but definitely is worthwhile. Digital Transformation allows businesses to leverage the changes and opportunities that are presented by digital technologies and their accelerating impact in a way that is strategized and prioritized to become an advantage and not a disadvantage. From the organizational perspective, this is an urgent requirement, and facilitating it means removing that disconnect between the business and IT. From the IT perspective, usually the need for a digital transformation is understood. The issue is that it seems impossible in the current environment. A lot of organizations lack the flexible approach they can leverage. Three main Pillars of DevOps seem impossible without the mindset change.
DevOps emerged to help IT find the balance between change and stability that the business requires to deliver value. It can be delivered by:
To start understanding the concepts and principles let’s start with C.A.L.M.S. as an acronym that allows us to focus on key aspects.
There are three ways of achieving these principles – Flow, Feedback and Continuous Experimentation.
The First Way focuses on understanding how workflows – at its most basic, how work moves from Dev to Ops and then from the functional areas of the business to customers – from left to right, one team to another. This means identifying how individual pieces fit together – understanding what things are moving from team to team, why they are moving, and what will happen to them from there. Flow is about identifying the constraints discussed earlier – understanding where the bottlenecks are and where productivity is slowest so that you can then prioritize for the biggest impact. It is only if you understand how workflows are, that you can clearly identify obstacles contributing to the “wall of confusion” and eliminate it.
The Second Way describes the principles that enable the reciprocal fast and constant feedback from right to left at all stages of the value stream. In IT, work happens within complex systems. The risk of catastrophic failure or consequences is very high. There tends to be a high degree of interconnectedness with tightly coupled components, and this variability and complexity means that doing the same thing twice will not always necessarily produce the same results. This means that safety, reliability, and stability become very important – systems thinking becomes crucial. Feedback loops help to create safer, more resilient systems of work because they provide more opportunities to detect and correct errors.
The Third Way focuses on the creation of a culture of continual experimentation and learning to enable the ongoing creation of knowledge for individuals, teams, and the organization. It involves breaking down silo culture, which is often a culture of fear and low trust and helping IT to embrace failure as a learning experience and to see the value in trying new things and innovating.
Beside the three ways DevOps also uses a few practical model processes to deliver its goals.
The Deployment Pipeline is a process model that gives you a starting point from which to provide transparency and controls as work moves through the various sets of tests and deployments towards release. In a nutshell it is depicted by the flow below:
Development> Commit> Build> Test> Provision> Deploy> Release to customer
Continuous integration is the practice of merging all developer working copies into a shared mainline (a code repository or a main code trunk) throughout the day. Within an automated Continuous Delivery process, continuous integration covers mainly the build stage. Usually, continuous integration applies to integrating, building, and testing code within the development environment.
Continuous Delivery is a set of practices designed to ensure that code is always able to be deployed rapidly and safely throughout its lifecycle to production, achieved by pushing the executables into a production-like environment and conducting automated testing to detect problems. Continuous Delivery doesn’t mean that every single change gets deployed to production. It simply means that every change could be deployed to production at any time. It is different from continuous deployment. In continuous delivery, release is a manual, human decision. Continuous delivery requires that if any change causes an automated test to fail that the developers stop the deployment pipeline and bring the system back towards being in a deployable state. Continuous Delivery is an essential DevOps practice. It is only through the continuous delivery of code that you can be confident that changes are producing business value.
Continuous Testing involves the execution of automated tests at every stage of the Deployment Pipeline. It provides immediate feedback at each stage to mitigate risk. Automated continuous testing is a key component of continuous integration and delivery. It ensures that the code and environment operate properly and remain in a deployable state.
Continuous Deployment is an extension of the concept of Continuous Delivery. In Continuous Deployment, all changes that pass automated tests are then automatically pushed into production. It automates the step that was previously manual in continuous delivery and enables multiple deployments per day. Continuous Deployment should be the goal of DevOps; however, it is understood that it may not be practical in all cases. Many organizations face regulatory or other requirements that make Continuous Deployment not viable. Deployment is not necessarily the same thing as release. Release is always a manual decision.
Benefits of DevOps for Brickendon and its clients
DevOps, if we want to have a look at the benefits, brings three key fields of improvement.
Improved Quality:
Increased Speed:
Reduced Costs:
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