Understanding the basics of DevOps
Now a days, a lot of tech companies must struggle with many problems that worsens their ability to offer fast and functional products, software or code because of delay in deployment. This problem originates mainly because operation and development teams don´t know how to work together. There is a lot of problems between their interaction that generates all kinds of troubles like stress, frustration and rivalry and this may end by affecting the company’s productivity, which may reflect in economic losses.
The problem unfolds in the following way. Most tech companies divide their teams in development and operations. The first team oversees generating the code. If they work separately from the operations team, they commonly face troubles while adapting their code from the production area to the development environment, which usually are different because teams don´t collaborate with each other. Once developers finish their applications they then “throw it over the wall” to the operation´s team who are responsible for deploying, running and maintaining it on the production environment. They also must deal with servers that grow quickly and are hard to maintain and, finally, they are responsible of diagnosing any error that occurs because of deployment; but, they usually don´t even understand the code that was given to them by developers. All these problems originate because teams don´t collaborate with each other and there is actually no teamwork at all.
The solution to all the above comes in one word: DevOps. In its simplest form DevOps is the idea that teams who produce applications should work together with those who are responsible for deploying, running and maintaining them. DevOps integrates developers and operations teams in order to improve collaboration and productivity by automating infrastructure, automating workflows and continuously measuring application performance. It is important to note that DevOps is not a skill, role or team, it’s a working culture.
The DevOps culture lets teams create an environment that goes towards collaboration, communication and complete integration. Working with small collaborative allows them to focus on small quantities of deployment, but with significant scale and important changes. Later, these changes are informed to the rest of the teams making each one understands the whole project and with this, the needs of the company. In the end you have teams with fewer frustration and with faster, better and more efficient results.
In summary, the teams need to overlook over:
- Automating code testing, automating workflows and automating infrastructure.
- Writing small amounts of code and then testing.
- Integrating testing monitors and controllers.
- Using source control to manage code changing.
- Working collaboratively.
In the end DevOps brings a lot of benefits. The automated infrastructure lets everyone focus on improving more important things concerning their business like, for example, coding; there is and increase rate of software delivery which leads to a better quality of product and a faster capability to innovate and, finally, the teams become more responsive with both business and coworkers needs.
In the end, DevOps leads to happier developers and happier customers.