The DevOps model is an increasingly popular way of working that combines practices, culture, and a range of tools. Using it leads to much faster results and greater benefits overall. How do you run projects using the DevOps model?
What is DevOps
Let’s start by explaining the term itself. DevOps combines two English words: development and operations. It brings together two areas that traditionally operated separately, namely the software development team (Dev) and the operations team (Ops). The idea behind this role is to emphasize closer communication and mutual involvement between these two teams in order to streamline processes and improve product quality. DevOps is an organizational culture aimed at getting people to work together as one team. As a result, it makes it possible to achieve goals more easily, faster, more safely, and consequently more effectively.
Key principles of DevOps
DevOps culture aims to reduce the conflicts that can arise in traditional organizations, where the divide between the people building software and the system administrators who deploy it is sharply drawn. The main principles of DevOps are:
- building a project while keeping the big picture in view
- shortening the software development cycle
- basing final decisions on reliable data
- deep monitoring from the very start of a project
The benefits of running projects with the DevOps model
A DevOps engineer is a specialist whose scope of work and range of responsibilities is very broad. A dedicated DevOps team can handle things like server administration, aimed at eliminating potential failures. Many companies choose to hire a DevOps specialist or an entire DevOps team because of the benefits this approach brings. These include:
- improved software quality – a multi-stage process aimed at running various kinds of software tests
- high availability across different ways of deploying software on a server, with the ability to install applications in multiple ways to maintain access to the service and full software functionality
- faster deployment – someone in this role stands out for their deployment expertise, taking the load off developers, whose main focus is writing code
- improved security of the solution being delivered – another requirement for someone working in DevOps is broad knowledge of the security of the solution delivered to the customer
- self-healing – the ability for an application to repair itself; this automation can involve running tests regularly and, in the event of a failure, restarting the application automatically
- scalability – the ability to deploy a solution designed to automatically increase the number of application instances during an unexpected traffic surge
Adopting the DevOps approach at work can guarantee significantly better results, and that’s exactly what we should be aiming for. It’s a modern approach, since the DevOps organizational culture itself emerged in response to a new way of working and a more development-driven approach to software.