In the digital age, customer needs are at lightning speed. Customer experience can make or break a company. Hence, more and more organizations are quickly adopting advanced technological strategies to achieve digital transformation. DevOps has brought in a fundamental change in the Development, Operations and Testing team interaction to ensure faster, reliable, and secure software delivery.

Let us take deep dive into DevOps – an integration of  Software Development and IT Operations

What is DevOps?

DevOps is the set of philosophies, tools and practices for organizations to increase their ability to deliver services and applications faster. This enables an organization to serve more effectively to their customers in the market.

In the following stages of the software development life cycle, you can implement DevOps tools:

Step 1: Understand the strategy for collaboration and shared tools for the Dev, QA, and infrastructure automation teams

DevOps teams must devise a standard tools strategy that will allow them to collaborate across development, testing, and deployment. This does not imply that you should spend days arguing about tooling; instead, it means that you should collaborate on a common strategy that includes DevOps.

• Processes
• Collaborative planning
• Continuous development tools
• Continuous integration tools
• Continuous testing tools
• Continuous deployment tools
• Ongoing operations and CloudOps tools

Creating a standard tools strategy does not drive tool selection — at least not yet. Instead, it entails deciding on a common share strategy that everyone can agree on and that reflects your DevOps business objectives.

The tool selection process frequently causes miscommunication within teams. A standard DevOps tools strategy must adhere to a common set of objectives while allowing seamless collaboration and tool integration. The goal is to automate everything: developers should send new and changed software to deployment and operations without relying on humans.

Step 2: Use tools to capture every request

DevOps should implement every type of requests for any changes in the software. Its provider better automates the software to accept every request for change from both sides, either from the DevOps team or the business. For example, it is making software adjustments to facilitate a request to improve database access.

Step 3: Application of agile Kanban project management

Kanban has the primary advantage of encouraging teams to focus on improving system flow. As teams adopt Kanban, they improve their ability to deliver completed work continuously. As a result, Kanban enables incremental product releases with small chunks of new functionality or defect fixes. Kanban’s feature makes it well suited to DevOps continuous delivery and deployment requirements.

Another significant advantage of Kanban is that it allows you to visualize your entire value chain and ensure consistent flow. As a result, it enables you to combine the workflows of various functions and activities ranging from development to integration/build, testing, deployment, and application monitoring. It will initially aid your Dev and Ops teams in their collaborative efforts. Over time, you can consolidate into a single group and workflow encompassing all Dev and Ops activities. Kanban gives you visibility into the entire process – and helps you transition to a DevOps culture.

Step 4: Using tools to tracklog metrics

One should always choose tools that aid in understanding the productivity of DevOps processes, both automated and manual. This allows one to determine whether it is working in one’s favour or not. First, decide which metrics are more relevant to DevOps processes, such as time to effective action vs several errors. Second, use an automated process to resolve problems without the assistance of a human controller. For example, we are dealing with issues related to automatically scaling software on a digital cloud podium.

Step 5: Implement test automation and data provisioning software

More than just automated testing, test automation can take code and data and run standard testing routines to ensure the quality of the code, data, and overall solution. Continuous testing is required in DevOps. Tossing code and data into the process necessitate placing the code in a sandbox, assigning test data to the application, and running hundreds — or thousands — of tests that, when completed, will automatically promote the code down the DevOps process or return it to the developers for rework.

Step 6: Carry out acceptance tests on all deployment tools

The acceptance tests that will be part of each deployment should be defined as part of the testing process, including acceptance levels for the infrastructure, applications, data, and even the test suite that you will use. Those in charge of DevOps testing processes should spend time defining acceptance tests and ensuring that they meet the acceptance criteria for the toolset chosen.

Development of operations may modify these tests at any time. And, as applications evolve, new requirements must be baked into the software, which must then be tested against these new requirements.

For example, to ensure that the enterprise meets the SLAs (service-level agreements), you may need to test changes to compliance issues related to protecting specific types of data or performance issues.

Step 7: Maintain continuous feedback between teams to identify gaps, issues, and inefficiencies

Finally, feedback loops will be required to automate communication between tests that detect issues and difficulties that must be supported by your chosen tool. The right tool must identify the problem using either manual or automated mechanisms and tag the problem with the artefact so that developers or operators understand what happened, why it happened, and where it happened.

The tool should also assist in defining a communication chain with all automated and human players in the loop. This includes a strategy for resolving the issue in collaboration with everyone on the team, an agreement on the type of resolution to use, and a list of any additional code or technology required. The tool should then assist you in defining tracking to report whether the solution made it through automated testing, automated deployment, and automated operations.

DevOps Tools

The DevOps tool categories include the following:

• Version Control:

  It is a collection of apps that track any change made in an array of files over time. It automatically and manually tracks software. In contrast to earlier version control systems, modern version control employs distributed storage via either a single master server or a network of distributed servers. In addition, version control systems keep track of the version’s dependencies, such as type, brand, and database.

• Building and Deployment:

  It is a collection of tools that automate software development and deployment throughout the DevOps process, including continuous development and continuous integration.

• Functional and Non-Functional testing:

  It is a collection of tools that allows for automated testing of DevOps’ functional and non-functional aspects. A set of testing tools should provide an integrated unit, check for performance updates, and ensure the app’s security. The sole purpose of these tests is to validate the entire automation system.

• Provisioning:

  It includes configuration management. Essentially, this means configuring your server with a tool such as Chef, Puppet, or Ansible. The term “provisioning” frequently implies that it is the first time you do it. However, config management is typically done regularly. The tools that assist in creating the provisions podium required for software deployment and monitoring the functions and logging any changes that may occur to the data or software configuration. It aids in the restoration of the system’s equilibrium.

Final Thoughts:

The DevOps processes follow a set of steps that run the length of the development chain. First, look at the strategies where such tools will improve efficiency, accuracy, ease of use, and speed to determine what tools you need.

Different organizations require a distinct set of tools to assist them in achieving DevOps goals, which typically vary depending on the company structure, operations, and environment. Therefore, selecting tools that will help teams at each stage of the development cycle is ideal.

Finally, tools alone will not deliver the best software unless there is an organizational culture shift, teamwork, collaboration, and a combination of the right skills and attitude.

Understand the symbiotic relationship between DevOps and Cloud. 

CloudThat is a leading AWS-DevOps consulting service provider committed to scale your business and get you ahead in the technology market. Check out more about DevOps from our experts and get in touch with us. Feel free to drop your queries in the below comments section and I will get back to you quickly.

WRITTEN BY Sridhar Immanni