In today’s fast-paced technology-oriented world, consumers expect their favorite applications to have the latest functionalities without longing for a large period. They do not want to hear about the efforts ‘behind the curtain’ and are solely interested in the ‘front product’. Keeping their needs in mind, software companies are also trying to devise methods to streamline the fast delivery of software products in the market.
With the launch of the DevOps movement in 2007, software companies raised concerns about the traditional software development cycle and moved towards the revolutionary DevOps approach. DevOps combines the functionalities of development and operations, which helps to reflect the process of integrating these subjects into a single, strengthened, and streamlined process.
In today’s blog, we’ll discuss how DevOps can help in faster and better software delivery. We will also touch upon the development of an effective DevOps pipeline to keep track of the demands and requirements of the customer in collaboration with the objectives of the company.
What is DevOps and how it works?
DevOps is a combination of practices and tools that integrate the processes between IT operations and the software development team in the company. It focuses on team empowerment, effective communication, and technology automation & integration.
A DevOps team includes the above two departments working collaboratively throughout the product’s lifecycle. These two teams are not ‘siloed’, rather they merge to form a single team where both the engineers cross-work across the entire product.
The team uses tools to accelerate and integrate processes, which ultimately improves the reliability of the end-product. Its toolchain allows the organization to tackle fundamentals like continuous delivery, automation, integration, and collaboration.
How DevOps helps in faster Software Deployment?
In a certain survey, 99% of the respondents agreed that DevOps improved their organization’s work. A DevOps pipeline is a set of practices that both teams carry out to build, test, and deploy the software product faster and easier. The major objective of using this service is to keep the process organized and focused.
DevOps Pipeline consists of stages like build, test, and deploy. Just like before releasing a product to the public, it must pass through numerous test cases, and make it more appealing to the audience, similarly, before releasing an app to the users, you need to make sure that it does not contain any fatal error causing it to crash unexpectedly.
DevOps keeps the process of building, testing, and deploying the product extremely streamlined and ordered, which helps in faster deployment of the final product.
Components of a DevOps Pipeline
To ensure the code moves from one stage to another in a seamless manner, many DevOps strategies are implemented. Have a look at below stages:
1. Continuous Integration
This is a procedure of combining small code snippets from different developers into a shared code repository as often as possible. Using this strategy, you can test the existing code for errors, without having to wait for others to upload their code.
This not only saves time but prevents large teams from Integration Hell.
Traditionally, developers had to wait for a long time to submit their code, integrate with others, and finally test it for errors. On the contrary, CI encourages developers to submit their code snippets daily. This reduces the burden of waiting for others, integrating large files, and spending hours debugging errors.
The central source control system, CI’s heart, enables the teams to arrange their code, track changes, and enabled automated testing.
2. Continuous Delivery
An extension of CI, Continuous Delivery speeds up the release process by encouraging the developers to release code in incremental chunks. At this stage, it depends on you whether to push the code for production or hold it further.
A good way to assess your code is to push it into a production-like environment and observe its behavior. However, developers can deploy it at any time with a click of a button. Releasing code in smaller chunks is much easier to debug in comparison to releasing all changes at once. This helps you avoid bottlenecks and maintain a steady flow while merging conflicts.
3. Continuous Deployment
This phase fully revolves around automating the entire software release cycle. Here, code updates are automatically released to the end user without interference from any third-party. However, a rather dangerous aspect of this level of automation is that if it fails to mitigate all the errors along the way, incomplete code may get deployed which may even lead to users experiencing downtime.
Hence, these deployments should only be used while releasing minor code updates. Even if something goes wrong, you can easily roll back to the last safe state and recover the errors without any malfunction.
4. Continuous Testing
This involves running as many tests as possible at every single development stage to detect problems before reaching the production environment. This enables quick evaluation of risks in business.
This covers both functional and non-functional tests including integration, running units, tests, and dealing with security and performance aspects of the software infrastructure. It also encompasses a better sense of risk assessment, internal policy compliance, and quality control.
5. Continuous Operations
Continuous Operations maintain the optimum availability of applications and environment. It also mitigates the chances of users facing downtime and availability issues.
To gain complete benefit from this phase, you should have a robust automation and orchestration infrastructure that handles continuous monitoring of servers, containers, and databases.
Benefits of using DevOps in the Software Cycle
By 2025, the DevOps market is expected to reach over $12.85 billion. This means that the companies using DevOps will have an edge over others who do not. The advantages of using this strategy are listed below:
1. Speed
It has been noticed that teams that practice DevOps and work collaboratively, release their updates more frequently with a higher quality. This allows teams to build, test, and deploy their products with automated functionalities.
2. Better Collaboration
Better Collaboration
As the name suggests, DevOps help in a cross-functional communication network between the developer and operations team. They work collaboratively and save time on related work to create code that is designed for the right environment.
3. Robust Deployment
DevOps teams increase their frequency and velocity, which results in the rapid deployment of their products. Quick repair of bugs gives you an edge in the market.
4. High Quality & More Reliability
Continuous integration and delivery ensure that the changes made in the product are functional and safe, improving the quality of the product.
Final Words
After reading the above blog, you must have understood the importance of using DevOps in streamlining the delivery of your software product. Not only this, it has several other features and benefits that you can enjoy by employing this strategy in your workplace to deliver high-quality products faster and easier.
