What is DevOps – A Complete Guide for Beginners

Today in this post we are going to discuss this topic – ‘What is DevOps – A Complete Guide for Beginners’. If you are interested then let’s go.

DevOps is practiced across different roles in an organization and requires several of them to collaborate closely. The true meaning of DevOps is all about delivering continuous value to customers. The results of adopting DevOps must be measured in relation to business objectives.

• The term ‘DevOps’ was coined in 2009 by PATRICK DEBOIS, an independent IT consultant who is bridging the gap between projects and operations by using Agile techniques in development, project management, and system administration.

• If you want to build better software quickly, then DevOps is the answer. This software development approach brings everyone to the same platform to quickly create secure code very quickly.

The DevOps movement began around 2007, when IT operations and software development communities raised concerns about the traditional software development model, where developers who wrote code worked apart from operations, who deployed and supported the code. In most cases, DevOps roles include development, IT, operations, security, and support.

What exactly is DevOps?

The word ‘DevOps’ is a combination of the terms Development and Operations, meant to represent a collaborative or shared approach to the tasks performed by a company’s application development and IT operations teams. Most often, DevOps is characterized by key principles: shared ownership, workflow automation, and rapid feedback.

DevOps is a set of practices that combine Software Development (Dev) and IT Operations (Ops). It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.

• DevOps is complementary with Agile software development (Agile software development refers to a group of software development methodologies based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams.); several DevOps aspects came from the Agile methodology.

• By adopting a DevOps culture along with DevOps practices and tools, teams gain the ability to better respond to customer needs, increase confidence in the applications they build and achieve business goals faster.

DevOps practices enable Software Developers (Devs) and IT Operations (Ops) teams to accelerate delivery through automation, collaboration, fast feedback, and iterative improvement.  Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams work together across the entire software application life cycle, from development and test through deployment to operations.

The Fundamentals of DevOps

DevOps covers a wide range of practices across the application lifecycle. It is the union of people, processes, and products to enable the continuous delivery of value to end-users.

Here, we have discussed the most important fundamentals of DevOps.

1. Source Code Management (SCM)

Source Code Management or SCM is a DevOps automation tool that maintains a track of versions (revisions) made to the program. Here, the teams looking for better ways to manage changes to documents, software and applications, images, large websites, and other collections of code and programming, configuration, and metadata among disparate teams.

2. Agile Project & Portfolio Management

Agile portfolio management is a more flexible way of managing a portfolio of projects, programs, initiatives, etc.

It is an agile approach to managing a portfolio of projects. This is done in a way that includes continuous experimentation, decentralized control, and transparency.

3. Continuous Integration (CI)

Continuous integration (CI) is the practice of automating the integration of code changes from multiple contributors into a single software project. It’s a primary DevOps best practice, allowing developers to frequently merge code changes into a central repository where builds and tests are then run.

‘GRADY BOOCH’ first proposed the term ‘CI’ in his 1991 method, although he did not advocate integrating several times a day.

4. Continuous Delivery (CD)

Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time and, when releasing the software, without doing so manually.

CD contrasts with continuous deployment, a similar approach in which software is also produced in short cycles but through automated deployments rather than manual ones.

5. Shift Left Security

Shifting left involves making changes in when, where, and how to apply security best practices. Security must build trust with developers and DevOps. It’s helpful to understand the DevOps automation culture and the speed with which they deploy code.

6. Monitoring and Feedback

DevOps monitoring entails overseeing the entire development process from planning, development, integration and testing, deployment, and operations.

Continuous feedback is essential to application release and deployment because it evaluates the effect of each release on the user experience and then reports that evaluation back to the DevOps team to improve future releases.

7. Continuous Development

At this stage, the technical teams looking for ways to provide feedback back into the development, test, packaging & deployment stages to complete the loop to integrate DEV and OPS teams and provide real-time feedback from production environments and customers.

Customers start with one or more of these practices in their journey to DevOps success. It aims to create a culture and environment where building, testing, and releasing software can happen rapidly.

How Does DevOps Work?

DevOps is a methodology meant to improve work throughout the software development lifecycle. Sometimes, these two teams are merged into a single team where the engineers work across the entire application lifecycle, from development and test to deployment to operations, and develop a range of skills not limited to a single function.

• Starting from design and development to testing automation and from continuous integration to continuous delivery, the team works together to achieve the desired goal.

• People having both development and operations skill sets working together and use various tools for CI-CD and monitoring to respond quickly to customers need and fix issues and bugs.

• To avoid wait times, IT teams use CI/CD pipelines and other automation to move code from one step of development and deployment to another. Teams review changes immediately and can enforce policies to ensure releases meet standards.

• DevOps teams use tools to automate and accelerate processes, which helps to increase reliability. A DevOps toolchain helps teams tackle important DevOps fundamentals including continuous integration, continuous delivery, automation, and collaboration.

In some DevOps models, quality assurance and security teams may also become more tightly integrated with development and operations and throughout the application lifecycle. When security is the focus of everyone on a DevOps team, this is sometimes referred to as DevSecOps (Development, Security, and Operations).

Most Important Tools for DevOps

DevOps practices rely on effective tools to help teams rapidly and reliably deploy and innovate for their customers. These tools from third parties can simplify repetitive processes and help dev and ops teams handle dynamic settings on a scale.

Let’s take a look at the chart for a better understanding.

DevOps Stage	Tools	Use of the Tool
PLANNING	1. Scheduling Software 2. Expense trackers	To manage the lifecycle process of Software Development.
VERSION CONTROL	1. Git 2.Subversion 3. CVS 4. Mercurial 5.  SVN	Version control, also known as Source Control, is one of the key tools used by successful DevOps teams for reducing development time and increasing the rate of successful deployments. It helps software engineering teams to collaborate at the speeds required by today’s constantly shifting IT environment.
BUILDING	1. Leiningen 2. Puppet 3. Docker 4. Packer	To ensure consistency across multiple developments cycles.
TESTING AND DEPLOYING (CI/CD TOOLS)	1. Jenkins 2. GitLab CI 3. CircleCI	DevOps testing is the main key to high-quality software delivery. Continuous testing is an essential part of CI and CD pipelines that helps to deliver frequent, high-quality software.
CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT	1. Red Hat Ansible 2. Chef 3. Puppet	Configuration management tools make changes and deployments faster; remove the potential for human error, while making system management predictable and scalable.
MONITORING AND FEEDBACK	1. Sensu 2. Grafana 3. PagerDuty 4. Sumo Logic	DevOps monitoring tools provide a comprehensive view of a production environment in real-time, automation, and expanded management throughout the application lifecycle – from planning, development and testing to deployment and operations.

The Benefits and Importance of DevOps

The business value of DevOps and the benefits of a DevOps culture lies in the ability to improve the production environment in order to deliver software faster with continuous improvement.

The benefits of DevOps include faster and easier releases, team efficiency, increased security, higher quality products, and consequently happier teams and customers.

DevOps benefits and importance include the following:

1. High Speed

DevOps delivers the highest business value item quickly as it follows Agile Principles. DevOps lets the developers keep an eye on the device during its whole development cycle for any app changes or glitches. This lowers the time for bugs to be tracked, found, and patched, which speeds up your time to market. Teams that practice DevOps release deliverables more frequently, with higher quality and stability.

2. Rapid Delivery

By increasing the frequency and velocity of releases, DevOps teams improve products rapidly, and more importantly, they are able to meet customer demand, which improves the ROI (Return on investment).

3. Enhanced Collaboration

Under a DevOps model, developers, and operations teams collaborate closely, share responsibilities, and combine their workflows. This makes teams more efficient and saves time related to work handoffs and creating code that is designed for the environment where it runs.

4. Enhanced Risk Management Skills

Using this practice we can identify the risk factor early in the application lifecycle stages. Early detection of any issues or bug and quick correction or fixes helps to stay ahead in the competition.

5. Greater Scalability

By following DevOps best practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery ensure changes are functional and safe, which improves the quality of a software product.

6. Improved Security

While implementing automation Security is a very important factor, by following the DevOps model and using Infrastructure as code and by doing automation of process and compliance policies, one can take control of security configuration.

Security is built into the product by integrating active security audits and security testing into agile development and DevOps workflows.

7. Production Support

In this model, engineers not only work on new updates but within a solution that is already in a development environment and they also concentrate on solving crucial security issues in real-time.

In today’s competitive software Industry, Automation and AI (Artificial Intelligence) plays a major role, and to stay ahead in the market and attract your stakeholders and customer we must transform and adapt the DevOps Best Practices.

Software and the Internet have transformed the world and its industries, from shopping to entertainment to banking. Software no longer merely supports a business; rather it becomes an integral component of every part of a business. Companies interact with their customers through software delivered as online services or applications and on all sorts of devices. That’s why DevOps is very important in this tech world.

Salary of a DevOps Engineer

DevOps Engineer Salary in India ranges between ₹ 4.0 Lakhs to ₹ 14.0 Lakhs with an average annual salary of ₹ 6.0 Lakhs. Salary estimates are based on 25.1k salaries received from DevOps Engineers.

In the US, the average salary for a DevOps Engineer is $126,223. And the average total compensation for a DevOps Engineer is $141,516.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers earned a median income of $110,140 per year in 2020.

Hope you enjoy this article on ‘What is DevOps – A Complete Guide for Beginners’. If you have any queries, please comment. THANK YOU & if you wanna help to grow this website then don’t forget to share.