DevOps : A New Hope

DevOps is quite different from the previous methodologies because it focuses on driving "cultural change" to increase efficiency. It does this by uniting the magic of all teams working on a project, using integration and automation. With these ingredients, you get a cross-integration across all departments, (QA+sysadmins+developers). For example, ensuring developers can now be involved in deployment and sysadmins can now write scripts, QA can figure out how to fix flaws vs constantly testing for functionality. By introducing automation and integration of systems, these engineers can now have the same visibility at all times and interact accordingly.

Why is DevOps important?

DevOps builds a philosophy that emphasises building trust and better liaising between developers and other teams (sysadmins, QA, etc.). This helps the organisation align technological projects to business requirements, increasing the impact and value to the business as projects become more efficient and prioritised accordingly. Changes rolled out are usually small and reversible, visible to all teams involved. Also ensuring the better communication and workflow between the teams.

In Summary:

Thanks to the advent of DevOps, today's development infrastructure is fully automated and operates on a self-service basis:

• Developers can provide resources to public clouds without depending on IT to provision infrastructure, which in the past led to weeks to months of delays.
• Continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) processes automatically set up testing, staging, and production environments in the cloud or on-premises. They can be decommissioned, scaled, or re-configured as needed.
• Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) is widely used to deploy environments declaratively*, using tools like Terraform and Vagrant.
• Organisations can now provision containerised workloads dynamically using automated, adaptive processes

How does DevOps work?

DevOps is visualized as an infinite loop, describing all the comprising phases:

• CI/ CD – In the previous task, we mentioned CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment); CI/CD deals with the frequent merging of code and adding testing in an automated manner to perform checks as new code is pushed and merged.
• INFRASTRUCTURE AS CODE (IaC) – a way to manage and provision infrastructure through code and automation. Thanks to this approach, we can reuse code used to deploy infrastructure (for example, cloud instances), which helps inconsistent resource creation and management.