What is DevOps? Why does it make development smarter?

Because IT operations are becoming increasingly important in companies, optimizing the collaboration between IT departments and software development is of great significance. This is where DevOps comes in - a portmanteau of Development and IT Operations. Shared incentives and processes are intended to enable more efficient and effective collaboration through DevOps approaches.

Summary

One concrete area of application for DevOps is where the quality of the software, the speed of development and delivery, and the cooperation between the teams involved need to be improved. This is important because a wide range of different tools and infrastructures have to be considered and coordinated in software development. The more harmoniously the individual areas work together, the faster organizations can deliver their software in better quality.

The question is how individual processes work and what collaboration with DevOps methods actually consists of. For example, web platforms are developed by development teams. Test versions run exclusively for the team on internal servers. What steps are then necessary - and who is responsible for them - to make such a project available to millions of customers worldwide instead of just a few developers? Who takes care of installation, maintenance, scaling and troubleshooting? Is this DevOps work done internally or do companies let Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others take care of it?

In the following, we first take a look at what role DevOps approaches and culture play for companies and what the application cycle of such approaches consists of. We then look at the profession of DevOps engineer and how this can help companies improve software development.

DevOps for teams

At a basic level, DevOps approaches enable roles that were previously separated to be coordinated and brought together again. This creates better and more reliable products as a result of collaboration between development, IT operations, quality management and security.

Introducing a DevOps culture with specific methods and tools enables teams to respond better to customer requirements. This can increase trust in the applications being developed and help business goals be reached faster. Concrete results of applying these methods include shorter time to market, improved MTTR (Mean Time To Recover), greater stability and reliability of systems, and more flexible adaptation to the market and competition in general. Of course, general risk reduction during development and cost reduction, which becomes particularly noticeable in long projects, are also advantages.

DevOps culture

DevOps methods automate and optimize processes through technology, but fundamentally everything starts with the culture in the organization and the people involved in the processes. Besides expertise, what matters is how well a team can work together toward a common goal. Important factors include commitment, teamwork and openness to new processes and methods.

Introducing a DevOps culture requires far-reaching changes in the way employees work and collaborate. If an organization decides to introduce such a new work culture and succeeds in establishing it, an environment can be created for extremely high-performing development teams. The team can take full responsibility for the product - from design to delivery to the customer - which leads to high motivation and identification with the product.

General benefits include better collaboration and coordination between team members and adjacent IT departments. Developers also benefit from a continuous flow of information and more focused work. Finally, developers can concentrate fully on development and are not distracted by operational topics such as server maintenance and other tasks. What is particularly important with regard to teamwork and remote leadership can be read in this blog article.

DevOps + Cloud = ❤️

At the beginning we talked about process-related questions using DevOps approaches. What role does the Cloud play in this - the short version of cloud computing, meaning IT infrastructure such as data storage and computing resources as a service over the internet? DevOps does not require the use of cloud services; DevOps can also manage and operate its own IT infrastructure.

The combination of DevOps and Cloud can, however, make a lot of sense. Cloud stands for automation, standardization and scaling of infrastructures. Cloud means agility. For on-demand provisioning of infrastructure, cloud variants are often the best solution.

Changes in the market and trends such as big data, mobile and cloud computing are transforming business models. Companies must be able to react intelligently to such changes. Customers demand rapid software changes or faster development and update cycles. Companies therefore have to rethink not only their IT infrastructure but also the way applications are developed and, above all, operated. The highest priorities here are agility, flexibility and intelligent, modern application cycles. The IT infrastructures that are common today often do not provide the flexibility needed to adapt applications and processes to rapid changes. It is therefore important to supplement classic IT infrastructure with cloud-based IT services and to use intelligent application cycles.

DevOps application cycle

With DevOps there is no clearly separable cycle, and the tasks involved are not clearly separated from one another either. In general, the cycle can be divided into four phases: after the planning and development phase come the deployment and operation of the applications.

Plan

During the planning phase, ideas and features are concretized. DevOps teams define and describe the applications and systems they are working on. Progress is tracked at low and high granularity. In other words, development moves from tasks for a single product to tasks for a broad product spectrum. An important characteristic of the planning phase is the flexibility of DevOps teams.

One goal is to make planning visible - for example through the use of Kanban boards and the resulting visualization of progress. With Kanban, the individual upcoming tasks are tackled intelligently - that is, the most important tasks, those that move the project a big step forward, are worked on first.

Develop

The development phase includes all aspects of programming, meaning writing, testing, reviewing and integrating code by team members. DevOps teams are able to deliver innovations quickly without companies having to accept losses in quality, stability or productivity. To do this, they use a variety of tools and automate everyday manual steps. This is often done through the use of CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery) tools and clearly defined work and process sequences in the form of pipelines.

Deploy

Deployment or delivery is the ongoing process in which DevOps teams are responsible for the consistent and reliable delivery of applications in development. This includes the provisioning and configuration of infrastructure as well as a release process. This requires clearly defined phases and approval processes. DevOps teams define automated gates that move applications between different phases until they are made available to customers. For example, a new version can only be delivered to end customers once all automated and manual tests have been successfully completed.

By automating these processes, they become scalable, repeatable and controllable. This allows DevOps teams to deliver their projects regularly, easily and confidently. Delivery here does not mean shipping a CD; today it means providing a web service in the cloud used by the customer.

Operate

The fourth and final step is the operations phase, which includes managing, monitoring and troubleshooting applications. When introducing DevOps methods, teams must ensure the reliability and availability of all systems. This serves to minimize downtime and errors in the system. Such errors can occur under real load from millions of users or when processing customer-specific data formats. DevOps teams aim to identify problems and resolve them quickly together as a team before they occur at the customer and affect them. Maintaining this vigilance requires extensive telemetry data, interactive alerts and complete visibility into the applications and the underlying systems.

It is important to note that there is no uniform application cycle and that the four phases are subject to constant change due to new experiences, new programs and new challenges.

DevOps methods

In addition to introducing DevOps culture, organizations should also implement various DevOps methods to accelerate, automate and optimize the phases mentioned above. These methods can span multiple phases and enable teams to create seamless processes and thereby increase productivity. These methods include version control and agile software development.

Version control

This refers to managing code in different versions. The changes and extensions made by developers to the source code are tracked. Version control systems such as Git are often used for this. Several developers can work on the same code base together. The use of a version control system is a fundamental DevOps method.

Agile software development

Collaboration, customer orientation and flexibility are actually core elements in all modern organizations. This is also the case in software development. Agile software development is an approach whose focus is on collaboration, customer and user feedback, and a high degree of adaptability to change through short release cycles. Teams working according to the principle of agile software development continuously provide customers with changes and improvements. One advantage is that they constantly gather feedback and use it to take customer wishes and requirements for their applications into account. Kanban and Scrum methods are often used in agile software development.

DevOps engineer

The tasks of a DevOps engineer are very diverse. Just like DevOps tasks and methods, there are no clear lines here and they depend on the use case and team. Tasks include designing and creating scripts and development tools for agile software development, carrying out administrative tasks, monitoring IT infrastructure and services, designing and carrying out software tests, and finding and optimizing solutions for operational processes.

The DevOps engineer is therefore at home in development and programming of tools and software as much as in practical implementation in the IT field and administration of production.

What are the requirements for a DevOps engineer?

To determine the necessary skills and experience more precisely, we looked at a number of job postings from well-known job boards. Specifically, the following was requested:

• Professional experience in software development
• Know-how in microservice architectures
• Strong communication skills
• Project experience in Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD)
• Experience with cutting-edge technologies such as Kubernetes, Docker and Jenkins
• Experience with the leading cloud platforms

In addition to IT knowledge, degrees are often required as well as very good German and English language skills.

How can DevOps help your company?

The goal of DevOps is to continuously provide customers with high-quality products. This includes responding flexibly to new customer requests and adapting to new situations. DevOps goals must always be considered and evaluated in relation to the organization’s and the customer’s business goals, because DevOps teams ideally support these through the automation of manual processes, targeted ways of working and the resulting shorter release cycles.

In fact, DevOps teams or DevOps engineers bring major advantages, but they are quite difficult to find. The main reason for this is the shortage of skilled workers in Germany, which has become even more severe due to the strong demand for digitalization in recent months. Almost all companies, especially those in the automotive and financial sectors, are currently looking for IT staff on a large scale. A useful and often better alternative to permanently employed IT staff are freelancers. You can learn more about how freelancers can help you reach your goals faster and more successfully here.

Have we sparked your interest in DevOps methodologies? Do you have questions about how your software development could be improved by DevOps teams? Feel free to get in touch and we will be happy to talk about your questions without obligation.