DevOps: The Evolution and Influence of DevOps in Modern Business

[KalpanaChauhan]

Historically, Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) teams operated independently, each pursuing distinct goals. The Dev team focused on quickly delivering product features or applications, while the Ops team prioritized maintaining system stability and minimizing downtime. This resulted in slow deployment times, limited communication, and collaboration, and compromised software quality, among other issues. In response to these inefficiencies in traditional software development and IT operations processes, the concept of DevOps emerged.

The DevOps era effectively addresses challenges by fostering seamless collaboration between Dev and Ops teams, aligning efforts toward common goals such as improved operational efficiency, accelerated time to market, and enhanced software quality. DevOps comprises practices aimed at boosting collaboration and automation between software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) teams, ultimately striving to deliver software faster, reliably, and at higher quality.

DevOps is essential for organizations as it automates repetitive tasks, reducing errors and allowing teams to focus on valuable work. Practices like Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) streamline software delivery, enabling faster, frequent releases that save costs through automation and efficient resource use. Quick issue identification and resolution also minimize downtime.

Moreover, DevOps empowers organizations to release new features more often, meeting customer expectations for ongoing innovation. It supports rapid innovation and effective responses to market shifts, offering a competitive edge in dynamic business settings.

• Practises and Concepts of Devops:

DevOps revolve around fostering collaboration, automation, and a cultural shift within organizations to achieve seamless software delivery and operational efficiency. Some key practices and concepts of DevOps include:

• Continuous Integration: Continuous Integration (CI) stands as a foundational practice within DevOps, where developers consistently merge their code changes into a central repository. The primary objective of CI is to facilitate the seamless integration and testing of code changes from various developers, reducing integration issues and fostering faster feedback loops.

In the CI process, developers routinely commit their changes to a version control system, such as Git or SVN. Following each commit, an automated build process is triggered, involving code compilation, resolution of dependencies, and the execution of tests, including unit tests and integration tests. Reports on the build and test results are generated to promptly notify the development team. Numerous CI tools are available, with selection depending on the programming language used, examples being Jenkins, Travis CI, Circle CI, Bamboo, among others.

• Continuous Deployment:
  Continuous Delivery (CD) serves as an extension of Continuous Integration (CI), with a primary emphasis on automating the release and deployment processes. Its objective is to swiftly and reliably deliver code changes to production environments following successful integration and testing. CD works to automate the deployment of code changes, ensuring frequent and consistent releases to end-users.

Upon completion of the CI process and the successful passage of all tests, CD takes over to automate the deployment process to production environments. This involves tasks such as packaging the application, configuring deployment scripts, and executing the deployment workflow.

In essence, CI concentrates on frequent code integration and testing to detect integration issues early, while CD extends this by automating the deployment process, facilitating rapid and reliable deployments of code changes to production.

Diagram 1: CI/CD Pipeline (Mosyan,David 2023)

• Infrastructure as Code:  In DevOps, automation plays a pivotal role as a cornerstone principle. It involves the systematic use of tools and processes to manage and configure infrastructure as code (IaC). Infrastructure as Code refers to the practice of defining and provisioning infrastructure elements—such as servers, networks, and databases—through machine-readable script files rather than manual intervention.

The essence of automation in DevOps is to streamline and simplify the complexities associated with deploying and managing infrastructure. By representing infrastructure configurations as code, DevOps teams can achieve greater consistency, repeatability, and efficiency in their processes.

There are various tools used in the realm of IaC to automate the provisioning, configuration, and management of infrastructure. Few popular tools are Ansible, Chef, Puppet ,Terraform etc.

• Continuous Monitoring: In the realm of software development and operations, monitoring plays a crucial role in providing insights into the health of your system, by collecting data about the performance of cpu, disk i/o, and memory usage and helps identify issues early on, and enables faster resolution of problems. There are various tools used by the organization as per their needs and its IT environment for monitoring like Nagios, APM tool-App Dynamics, Grafana, etc.
• Use cases of Devops in Public Sector:

The specific applications of DevOps may vary from organization to organization depending on their unique needs, industry characteristics, and technology stacks. In specific to public sector, where efficiency, security, and compliance are paramount, DevOps practices offer significant advantages.

Few such use cases in public sector may include, but not limited to:

Streamlining application development and deployment: Implementing DevOps within public sector agencies can optimize their application development and deployment procedures, thereby diminishing the duration required to introduce new features and updates to the market. This acceleration can result in expedited delivery of public services, enhancing the overall experience for citizens.

Government IT Modernization: Deployment of DevOps in the modernization efforts for legacy government IT systems to enhance efficiency and reduce technical debt. DevOps can be used to automate the provisioning of infrastructure like servers and networks, which can help organization to reduce the time and effort required to provision new environments and while ensuring that infrastructure is configured correctly and securely.

• Revolutionizing DevOps: Unveiling Enhanced Capabilities with HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise"

Many companies provide DevOps solutions to facilitate development and deployment processes for DevOps teams, Examples include Circle CI, AWS CodePipeline, and Azure DevOps. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) provides tailored DevOps solutions for private cloud environments, streamlining software development and delivery.

HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise enhances the developer experience, accelerating CI/CD pipelines and enabling seamless deployment of new applications and workloads. To modernize your multi-gen IT with a consistent cloud experience refer to : HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise .

Key takeaways:

DevOps Transformation Impact: The adoption and integration of DevOps practices signify a transformative journey for organizations, enabling them to achieve unprecedented levels of collaboration, efficiency, and innovation.

DevOps Implementation Essentials:  Implementing a DevOps approach in organizations necessitates careful consideration of various aspects, including cultural, organizational, security, ,training and forming a cross functional team to break down silos and foster a collaborative environment.

• Processes: The transition heavily relies on processes, necessitating synchronization with Agile methodologies to facilitate ongoing development and delivery via CI/CD pipelines.
• Effective monitoring is essential to gain insights into application health and performance, enabling continuous improvement through feedback loops.
• Training and Skill Development: DevOps requires a diverse set of skills, including infrastructure management, software development, and operations expertise.

Kalpana Chauhan
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

twitter.com/HPE_UKI
linkedin.com/company/hewlett-packard-enterprise
hpe.com/uk