DevOps

What is DevOps?

Yes, it is about the famous Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD), but not all about it! What about collaboration between teams, current IT practices, continuous service improvements (feedback), monitoring, security etc. And one might have found many organizations defining DevOps according to their understanding and practices, and the good news is they might be right, because there is no rigid definition for DevOps! But for us DevOps is most about "collaboration" between Development and Operations with "automation" as a key principle! That's it!

It appears that the term DevOps was evolved to promote the CI/CD practices within the IT Development Teams as well as to share them with IT Operations, so that the business benefits could be realized faster. But that doesn't mean ITOps should start to perform Development Team's work or vice-versa (we'd call it extreme DevOps but let's leave this fanatic thought aside)! The CI/CD practices, tools, frameworks for Development teams could be completely different from the CI/CD practices, tools and frameworks for Operations. As a result, many matured organisations do believe that one of the most important aspects of implementing DevOps practices in any established organisation is the culture change!

Following picture highlights that as the collaboration grows i.e. as both Developers & Operations understands the key challenges, goals & practices of each other, while implementing automation in their own areas, the DevOps score goes up!

Below diagram depicts a quick overview of the core DevOps model presenting continuous development, testing, delivery, deployment along with continuous feedback/improvement to close the loop.

Why DevOps?

Well, What happens when Dev & Ops understands each other?

Yes, as you'd imagine:

 - Dev team starts to involve Ops right at the beginning of their development efforts
- Both understands the big picture together i.e. organisational goals, business needs and goals, and hence work together with each other to achieve single outcome
- Ops team starts to tune their operations and releases according to the Dev team's requirements
- Both help each other find the bottlenecks and promote Automation
- Result is high quality code, faster release to market, better ROI! We are talking business now, Eh! :)

Refer to DevOps Matrix if you are wondering what is involved at what stage.