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Two technology innovations of the past decade have fundamentally changed how IT works and given rise to the “DevOps” phenomenon. Before we dive into what DevOps is and how IT organizations should adopt this culture, let’s review what gave rise to it in the first place. We have more useful articles at SPOTO where we have upadated various certification exams topics.
Pull from Agile Development
The last decade has seen many organizations abandon the traditional “waterfall” software development process in favor of “agile” development. Agile is all about small, specific user-centric stories, described by a product owner and delivered in short sprints of two to four weeks by small, focused development teams.
Agile development led to the emergence of more frequent code drops from software engineers, which needed to be deployed more quickly. No longer was it okay to take days or weeks to deploy a new software version; developers working in two-week sprint cycles want deployment to work within minutes with a high degree of predictability.
Enabled by the Cloud
Before the cloud came along, access to infrastructure required human interaction and manual operations. Processes typically could not be automated effectively. This meant that operations were slow and error-prone and created a huge point of friction in the software development life cycle.
Around the same time that developers were adopting agile development, the cloud became real, and infrastructure could be orchestrated effectively using APIs to provision everything from machines and networks to storage, routing policies and firewalls.
DevOps: Closed Loop Automation Between Development and IT
Agile development and cloud computing created the perfect storm in which DevOps was born: this new way of doing IT is all about ensuring closed loops, with 100 percent automation.
In the simplest terms, this meant that each of the steps outlined in Figure 1 need to be fully automated, and integrated with preceding and following steps. Doing this ensures software can be developed faster, deployed quickly, and iterated upon more rapidly.
Benefits
Done right, DevOps leads to a virtuous cycle of greater productivity across development and IT, greater agility in bringing new experiences to market and greater impact on the business.
Adopting DevOps: You Can Phase It In
Organizations looking to adopt DevOps should do so in phases and define metrics for each phase. Here’s a typical phased approach that you can use as a baseline and customize to your organization’s unique needs.
