DevOps Explained

DevOps is a combination of cultural philosophies, practices and supporting toolsets that are aimed to increase an organization’s ability to release changes quickly to end users, with high quality and reliability.

It applies the same principles that transformed the manufacturing industry - by optimizing the process of converting raw materials to finished goods - to software releases.

Benefits

• Speed – focuses on faster, automated releases

• Rapid delivery - smaller, frequent changes

• Reliability – automated tests and real-time monitoring

• Scale – automated, consistent and repeatable deployments

• Improved collaboration – shared responsibility between development and operations with combined workflows

• Security – automated compliance policies and controls

Cultural philosophies

The basic cultural shift in devops model is to blur the border between developers and operations by communicating and collaborating effectively and working together as single team to improve productivity of developers and reliability of operations.

Practices

• Agile: One of the fundamental practices of devops is to make small, incremental & frequent changes. This helps reduce the risk of releases and identify and address issues quickly.

• Continuous Integration: With continuous integration, developers regularly merge code changes to a central repository, which is then moved through a series of automated build and test steps. This helps developers find and address issues quickly and thus improve code quality and reduce time.

• Continuous Delivery & Deployment: With continuous delivery code changes are automatically, built, tested and also deployed to a deployed to non-prod or staging environment. This ensures that there is always a version of deployment ready build artifact that has gone through standardized tests. Continuous deployment goes one step further where every code change/build artifact that passes the standardized tests are deployed in production, automatically.

• Infrastructure as Code: Managing and provisioning infrastructure as code using software development practices such as version control and CICD helps to deploy changes quickly and repeatedly .

• Micro Services: Micro services architecture decouples complex application into simpler independent services with well defined interfaces. This allows teams to manage these services independently with reduced coordination for making changes and thus increasing delivery speed.

• Monitoring and Logging: Monitoring and analyzing production provides insights to impacts to end users due to changes and also helps identify root causes quickly. This helps improve operations continuously.

• Communication and Collaboration: Increased communication and collaboration is key for successful adoption of devops. Tooling and automation brings together development and operations workflows to collaborate towards a common goal.

DevOps combines cultural philosophies, practices, and tools to enable organizations to rapidly and reliably release changes to users. Key practices include agile development, continuous integration/delivery/deployment, infrastructure as code, microservices, monitoring, and collaboration. Get started on your DevOps journey with AWS DevOps Tooling.