Over the past few years, companies had been looking for ways to increase the effectiveness of their teams. From a ground-up approach, strategies like agile infrastructure and operations came to the forefront. These approaches went on to redefine the way teams functioned in larger corporations.
The concept of Developer Operations or DevOps first originated from strategies, such as agile and lean. The need for DevOps was realized with the need for a higher degree of collaboration between developers and operations teams. At its base, DevOps can be referred to as the practices of bringing development engineers and operations together to establish robust management of an application’s lifecycle.
Cloud computing pushed DevOps into mainstream adoption, as it considerably streamlined the process and allowed increased collaboration between teams. In addition to this, cloud service providers also began offering products that focused on a DevOps workflow.
In this article, we will explore the role of cloud computing in DevOps teams today. We will also learn how to approach DevOps without cloud computing, and the best practices to be followed when conducting DevOps in a cloud environment.
Table Of Contents
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Delivery
- Automating Application Deployment
- Continuous QA
- Microservices
- Infrastructure As Code
- Automating Application Deployment
- Knowledge Sharing
What Is DevOps?
During the late 2000s, practices such as the agile and lean started gaining momentum as multinational companies wanted to innovate quickly and react faster to advancements. These strategies were mainly implemented for software development and prioritized adapting to changes when new features came to the forefront. This laid the groundwork for developer operations, a methodology now taking the world by storm.
Simply put, developer operations are a group of strategies that are employed to optimize the delivery of new features, applications, and services to the end user. It is commonly used in applications wherein a new set of features is required at a quickly-evolving pace and is therefore used to ensure a quick and seamless deployment.
One of the most prominent characteristics of DevOps is the removal of workflow siloes. In a typical workflow, teams are siloed according to the kind of operations they conduct. They are then required to communicate with each other regarding the deliverables they are tasked with.
In DevOps, this practice is removed, as all concerned teams fall under the umbrella of ‘DevOps’. Engineers work on the application from beginning to end, with increased collaboration and communication as different teams are restructured into one.
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For example, a typical application development is split into three units – design, development, and deployment. The design team works on the specifics of the features of an app, its look and feel, and the flow of the user experience and interface. This information is then passed on to the development team, which creates and tests the code of the application. Finally, the completed application is passed on to the deployment team, which works on bringing the app to the end user through a website, app store, or similar channels.
When approaching the same with a DevOps attitude, all three teams fall under one banner. This not only reduces the need for communication between teams, but also moves past the separation of duties that is present in a typical 3-team approach.
Generally, a product’s lifecycle does not end once it is developed and deployed. User feedback is an integral part of the lifecycle, as it points developers in the right direction of feature design and improvements to the user experience. Upon receiving the feedback, implementing any changes requires the app to go through all three stages again. Under DevOps, the feedback is passed from deployment to designers directly to the developers, reducing the time-to-market for new features.
Quality assurance (QA) is another integral element of DevOps. Along with customer feedback, the hybrid workflow also enables accountability and collaboration on issues. Issue tracking is also implemented in a visible manner, thereby decreasing the time to fix errors and improving the user experience for the end customer.
Thus, DevOps not only increases the effectiveness of resources but also encourages communication between individuals across disciplines. DevOps offers many advantages. Let’s go through them one by one.
Advantages of DevOps
DevOps, as an approach, stands to improve the way many operations are conducted in a corporate setting. Taking cues from strategies, such as agile and lean; DevOps brings various advantages to the table for a unified approach to application development.
Speed
Implementing DevOps increases the speed of the entire application workflow, from genesis to deployment. Since all three teams fall under one umbrella, a product can be conceptualized and brought to market much more quickly. If an application needs to be deployed quickly, a DevOps strategy ensures better communication and more efficient results.
As with agile, DevOps greatly increases the speed at which new features can be added to a product. Minor improvements can be made at a higher rate due to frictionless communication between the members of the team.
Better Control over Application Lifecycle
DevOps prioritizes the management of an application’s lifecycle, allowing for factors, such as user feedback to become a part of product design. The collaboration between all team members also provides a shared vision of how an application should be designed.
This unified view of big-picture advancements allows for organic growth of the product as a whole. DevOps also facilitates information transfer between designers and developers, allowing for an intrinsic understanding of product design.
Improved Collaboration
With the use of a centralized center of control regarding product design, DevOps teams achieve collaboration across specializations. The approach prioritizes customer focus due to better control over workflows. The standard build-test-deploy workflow is also extended into accepting customer feedback in the building phase.
DevOps allows for organic communication between team members, as there is no need for long-winded communication procedures between various teams. This greatly reduces the time required to implement a change or work together on issues in the application.
Security
Owing to the sensitive and mission-critical nature of the application development workflow, protection and access control must be implemented. DevOps also allows for security to be enforced more easily on development and operation teams. Through the centralized architecture, security fixes and compliance measures can be easily rolled out. Company policy on data can also be automated, and access to the mission-critical part of the workflow can be easily restricted.
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After going through all the advantages DevOps offers to companies, it is natural to think of cloud as the way forward for this strategy. Cloud computing serves to increase the benefits of DevOps, along with offering a central platform to design, manage, and deploy applications.
The Role of Cloud in DevOps
Cloud computing brings accessibility and collaborative workflow tools to facilitate DevOps teams. Moreover, the cloud acts as a centralized repository to store all the information, code, and deployments regarding the application. This allows access across the entire team without the need for communication between discrete units.
Today, cloud service providers have many tools to facilitate a DevOps approach. These cloud-based tools allow for better management of the application during its lifecycle as well as the optimization of development tasks. These include source code management, knowledge management, and workflow automation.
A cloud repository also allows for the facilitation of another important part of DevOps; quality assurance (QA). Quality assurance in cloud platforms is executed easily, owing to the visibility and accountability that cloud computing brings to the table. In addition to this, quality is enforced through every phase of the product lifecycle.
Cloud computing optimizes and complements DevOps processes, due to the fine-grained control and automation procedures they offer. Cloud service providers often provide tools to automate various DevOps practices, allowing the team to focus on the development of the application rather than the repetitive practices required in DevOps.
The automation of these repetitive processes also allows for greater protection from human error. The overall security of the system is increased owing to the uptime benefits offered by cloud deployments. A DevOps approach to cloud provisioning also allows for the creation of stateless applications which run in the cloud and increase availability.
Cloud DevOps increases scalability due to the modular nature of cloud deployments. Strategies like cloud bursting are also useful for testing and deploying cloud applications. DevOps in the cloud can also be expanded as per the requirement without implementing a new hardware architecture.
Talking about the importance of cloud for DevOps, Sagi DudaiOpens a new window , CTO, VonageOpens a new window , says, “Definitely! DevOps plays a very important role in cloud. In the past, the role of operations was isolated to a specific team in the final stage of development – rollout and maintenance. That had a lot of downsides and created a lot of friction between development and operations teams, and also tended to slow things down.
Today, in the collaborative framework of DevOps, the teams are integrated and sharing responsibilities from end to end. It’s also helping to improve time to market and reduce mean time to repair (MTTR). Shared responsibility also reduces friction, finger-pointing, and hand-offs between different parts of the organization for a smoother and more efficient overall experience.â€
James BeechamOpens a new window , co-founder and CTO, ALTROpens a new window , shares, “Yes, they go hand-in-hand. In order to realize the gains in speed, flexibility, and efficiency that are the core reasons for moving to the cloud, you need to take advantage of the cloud’s advanced features like auto-scaling groups and rapid deployment across geographies, among many others.
When you take advantage of those tools, your deployment quickly becomes difficult to manage, and DevOps provides the solution to that. Essentially, going to a DevOps approach is the line in the sand between a simple “lift and shiftâ€, which doesn’t generate much benefit, and cloud-native, which truly taps into everything the cloud can do.â€
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Cloud DevOps Best Practices
There are various cloud DevOps best practices, such as continuous integration and delivery that can be followed. The availability of data across design, development, and deployment teams creates a synergy between all members, thus allowing seamless collaboration.
Continuous Integration
Owing to the availability of an application’s codebase and resources in a centralized cloud repository, continuous integration can be executed. During continuous integration, developers add any code changes into a repository, with the resulting test build being executed automatically.
This practice allows developers to find issues in the code easily as well as to execute the appropriate quality assurance measures. This also reduces the time required to integrate a new process into the application.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery refers to the practice of building and preparing an application for release after new additions are made. Each code change is tested to remove bugs and identify other issues with the application.
Moreover, this practice can be dependably automated, thus putting test builds through a quality checking process and making them deployment ready. This practice expands upon continuous integration by extending it to further down the product pipeline.
Automating Application Deployment
Application deployment can be dependably automated using cloud services and is meant to be used alongside continuous integration and delivery practices. A fully-automated deployment pipeline can be created using these practices.
This automated deployment pipeline offers many benefits, such as a quicker time-to-market and integration of new features. In addition to this, it also removes the intricacies of deploying a new version of the application with every update.
Continuous QA
Quality assurance is an important part of the cloud DevOps strategy, with many approaches prioritizing accountability at every step. Most QA processes can also be automated using cloud service providers, and low-cost production tests can be set up with relative ease.
A DevOps approach to cloud provisioning allows developers to move past quality testing on virtual machines and use cloud resources to ensure the quality of an application before deployment. All of these are conducted as a part of the DevOps workflow.
Microservices
A DevOps approach to cloud provisioning comes with the capability to develop and deploy applications as a set of microservices. Microservices are a group of small processes, each dedicated to perform a certain process in the application. These microservices then communicate with each other using an HTTP-based application programming interface (API), creating an app that is a collection of all the services.
Microservices can also be deployed independently and provide a unique vehicle to deploy new features to an existing codebase. In case of any issue with the new code, it can simply be brought offline without the need to shut down the application.
Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as code is symbolic of bringing together development practices and cloud deployments. The backend infrastructure of the application can only be built using APIs and code-based tools offered by cloud service providers. This allows developers to treat the infrastructure just like they would treat application code. Cloud deployments also remove the need to manually configure and deploy resources.
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Automating Application Deployment
Application deployment can be dependably automated using cloud services and is meant to be used alongside continuous integration and delivery practices. Using this practice, a fully-automated deployment pipeline can be created.
The automated deployment pipeline offers many benefits, such as a quicker time-to-market and integration of new features. In addition to this, it also removes the intricacies of deploying a new version of the application with every update.
Knowledge Sharing
A DevOps approach prioritizes collaboration and communication between all members of the team, with each member’s subject matter expertise coming into the big-picture view of the application. A centralized cloud repository facilitates this information transfer between the participants.
Developers are able to offer an in-depth view of the inner workings of the application, while the operations team can contribute towards improving the program in a live production condition. The strengths and weaknesses of each team complement each other, making knowledge sharing an important part of a successful cloud DevOps strategy.
Talking about the challenges organizations face, James BeechamOpens a new window , co-founder and CTO, ALTROpens a new window , adds, “DevOps changes everything, and you should have your organization be ready for that. When you create automation around deployment you’ve now put many more layers between development and deployment. This changes your development process. As a result, it is necessary to get your development team on board.
Also, watch out for cost. You can wake up with a big bill if you don’t know what you are doing. Many teams are not accustomed to watching a meter, so you have to build in a recognition of economics into the culture, especially when you have automated the cloud to expand its resources on its own as needed.
Finally, the demand for DevOps people is really high right now, and they are well-compensated. Make sure not to try to approach this on the cheap in terms of paying DevOps professionals, who are knowledgeable.â€
DevOps Without Cloud
Even though cloud offers many benefits for a DevOps strategy, it is possible to implement a solid DevOps workflow without cloud computing. Strategies, such as configuration as code and infrastructure as code can still be executed without a cloud server.
Local servers can allow DevOps to be executed within a company, as they serve as a centralized repository for the shared data of the team. This mostly offers the same benefits as using a service from cloud service providers, such as AWS or Microsoft Azure.
Virtual machines can be provisioned from on-premises devices, allowing for a much more controlled deployment and robust testing measures. Security and compliance needs are also reduced due to controlled access to company resources.
However, DevOps without cloud falls behind in a few areas. Applications cannot be dynamically tested or scaled as easily as in the cloud, as physical resources have to be requisitioned at an upfront cost. Moreover, strategies such as cloud bursting and agile development cannot be executed easily.
Closing Thoughts for Techies
According to James BeechamOpens a new window , co-founder and CTO, ALTROpens a new window , “Every company is becoming a software company, and with that trend comes the different ways that software must be integrated into operations. Additionally, the majority of companies who are already building software haven’t even made the jump to agile development, where DevOps comes into play.
These compounding trends mean that DevOps is going to continue to grow rapidly. With the integration of security into that world and a move to a DevSecOps approach, this role will continue to grow in its influence over the development process.â€
DevOps helps companies that require better deployment and development for applications. It places great importance on the customer, along with feedback and user insights.
The intercommunication between team members across specializations serves to enrich the employees, thus facilitating a big-picture view of the undertaking. The development process of an application is also optimized, with fixes and improvements being rolled out more efficiently.
Using the cloud, DevOps teams gain a higher degree of communication, collaboration, and scalability. Cloud service providers also offer many services to easily automate many DevOps tasks. Custom DevOps tools also enable better deployment processes and quicker updates.
As with its forerunners, such as agile and lean, a well-executed DevOps strategy enhances the effectiveness of both, the developers and the operations teams. DevOps also removes the siloes associated with data transfer across teams by centralizing the control of an application.
Do you believe in the benefits of DevOps for optimizing application development? Let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you.