DevOps
There is a great discussion in the world of software development about the advantages and disadvantages of methodologies used in different periods of times. Critics argue that the Waterfall model is hardly used by anyone anymore and it can be referred to as a dead methodology. Waterfall was designed as a sequential process made of components which were extremely dependent to each other .It used to work in environments where quarterly or month to month discharges were the standard. Long weeks of development, followed by long weeks of testing ,followed by long weeks of user testing did not made customers happy. They want to wait weeks rather than months to meet their needs.
Considering waterfall as gone, a new methodology called Agile came in, aiming to fill a number of the gaps discovered during the waterfall model. Agile main focus is to” hurry up” the delivery of applications. It solved the matter of long releases. Two to three-week sprints project organization is the typical sign of agile methodology. Multiple sprints are organized during the phase of final product release. This methodology made a tremendous improvement into software development. The client feedback is implemented quickly due to the densely sprints organizations. Moreover agile helped development teams by offering them the “comfort” of work prioritizing and also the clients had the ability to mention what works and what doesn’t in order to speed up the feedback loop. BUT there are still some issues for which agile could not take care of. When developing a software apart from coding and testing we have to pay close attention to the areas that differ from application area like networking, building up servers, patching etc.
Another flaw of agile methodology which left enough space for improvement was the lack of importance given to the operations team. The huge revolution made in development and testing teams was not felt by operations team.
DevOps came in…
This caused the need for a new touch in the software development methodologies, and there DevOps came in. With difference from Waterfall and Agile, DevOps is not considered as a methodology but as a culture shift. It’s a way of thinking about an overall application life cycle. Now, not only can development move quickly, but the entire release can.Deployments, patching, testing, the whole process moves exponentially faster. The DevOps “methodology” empowers teams to closely define, develop, and release applications.
DevOps brings all groups together.
No more development team, testing team, operations team. They’re the same group. One team performs all the functions. One team has a responsibility for developing the application, testing the application, releasing the application, and keeping it running. No more segregation of duty or function. The DevOps team does it all.
DevOps isn’t easy.
If someone defines DevOps as easy, there is a great possibility they are doing it wrong.DevOps is a culture change of a tremendous size. It requires a huge effort, the business must be a 100% involved in terms of project managers, the technology in the other side has to form a great team which supports the DevOps culture.
Moreover DevOps can’t do it if there are no skills and no investment.Dealing with this culture requires a lot of time and investment to find the tester who can also be a developer, to find a developer who can also be an Linux expert, simply said DevOps requires the right people and the right trainings.
What DevOps is all about?
As a software development approach, DevOps includes some specific phases over which every software should pass before being delivered at the end customer. The stages which build the all DevOps approach are listed as below:
- Continuous development
- Continuous testing
- Continuous integration
- Continuous deployment
- Continuous monitoring
How does it work?
In order to have a better point of view how all these stages relate with each other here is a simple explanation of the DevOps stages and all life cycle provided by a tool like GitLab:
Continuous development – Continuous integration
GitLab helps software development teams style or design , develop and firmly manage code and project knowledge from one distributed version system to modify speedy iteration and delivery of business price. GitLab repositories offer a ascendible, single source code for collaborating on, with aim to permit groups to be productive while not disrupting their workflows.By working on GitLab ,delivery groups absolutely embrace continuous integration to change the builds, integration and verification of their code.
Continuous testing and verification
GitLab provides software automated testing and code quality analysis to produce quick feedback to the whole team concerning the standard of their code used to create the software. Parallel execution and concurrent testing provided by CI/CD pipelines helps developers and testers quickly get insight concerning each commit, permitting them to deliver higher quality code quicker.
Continuous delivery package and release
By using Gitlab, teams have the possibility to package their applications and dependencies, manage containers, and build artifacts with ease. Artifact repositories and private container registry are built in and preconfigured to work unblemished with GitLab CI/CD pipelines and source code management.
Moreover GitLab helps development teams to shorten the whole process of delivery by automating it and the release process. The system becomes really smart and you don’t have to tell it what to do. Continuous Delivery (CD) are built into the pipeline, deployments can be automated to multiple environments like staging and production with no touch provided. GitLab will ensure to your teams faster delivery automated testing and confidence over the final product delivered to your customers.
DevOps Benefits
The DevOps practices are adopted by all the highest corporations to develop software of a high-quality and shorter development lifecycles, leading to bigger client satisfaction, one thing that each company desires. Also Kreatx is one of the small number of companies supporting this new culture of software development approaches in order to provide to our clients the best services on the market and respond to their needs on a record time.
Keep up with this fast pace.
The DevOps methodology brings its’s light over software development process but to remain existent in the world of DevOps you have to follow the next “stage” of this approach which is “Continuous Learning”.
In order to stay up to date with DevOps flow, in the next series we will jump into some more practical articles over CI/CD server with Jenkins, Build Automation, Setting Up Jenkins, Installing the PHP Quality Assurance Toolchain, Creating Your First Jenkins Job etc, so await further instructions in the next articles.
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