How DevOps Can Streamline Software Development Processes
Many business owners have questions about the direct benefits of DevOps for their business.
Using DevOps to streamline software development process methodologies and day-to-day operations can offer various benefits throughout your entire infrastructure.
The DevOps development lifecycle involves fine-tuning and enhancing your infrastructure for your development teams and development processes for both current and future projects.
Using agile project management methodologies, DevOps can streamline your software development process while reducing the workload on your engineers by automating simple and repetitive tasks while also eliminating some error-prone or sensitive parts of your workflow altogether.
OpSourced is a DevOps consulting company with over 15 years of experience helping businesses with any kind of software development project and infrastructure through DevOps implementation.
Principles and Practices of a Streamlined Software Development Process
DevOps is a common software development methodology, but it's essential to understand the principles, practices, and philosophy that are common aspects of DevOps—these influence how DevOps impacts your infrastructure and software and the benefits that it offers.
1. Continuous Integration (CI)
Continuous integration is an umbrella term that describes the automation of combining all developer's code changes into a shared mainline. When using continuous integration, code gets tested as it's integrated into the development environment. Constant testing allows you to detect and resolve any code issues early, allowing for efficient software development.
2. Continuous Deployment (CD)
Continuous Deployment involves frequently delivering software functionalities through automation. Updating code regularly provides for regular, reliable, and low-risk code releases.
3. Infrastructure as Code
Managing infrastructure configurations as code to allow version control, and scalability. Infrastructure as code can be automated to remove redundancy and increase efficiency.
4. Configuration Management
Configuration Management is the management and maintenance of configurations consistently throughout various environments. It allows you to maintain systems, such as computer hardware and software, in the desired state.
5. Monitoring, Logging, and Alerting
Monitoring and logging can be used to assess the performance of applications and detect issues promptly. Logging is a method of tracking and storing data to make sure applications are available and to evaluate their performance. Monitoring is a diagnostic DevOps practice that's used to alert to system-related issues by analyzing metrics. Paired with warnings and alerts on key thresholds of those actionable metrics, detection and response times improve along with application stability and availability.
6. DevOps Development Lifecycle
The DevOps development lifecycle is very similar to the traditional software development lifecycle. Still, the DevOps lifecycle is faster and focuses on efficiency by bringing the development and operations teams together.
7. Planning
Planning is the first step in any software development process. In the planning stage, you outline the project requirements and any additional features and functionalities. Planning is critical to a successful DevOps implementation because it helps make sure that your project starts with a strong foundation.
8. Coding
During the coding stage of the DevOps development lifecycle, developers write code to meet the requirements laid out in the planning stage.
9. Building
After the coding is completed, the new code will be introduced to the project. If necessary, at this point, the project could be rebuilt to accommodate the new code.
10. Testing
In the testing stage of development, the DevOps engineers test the code to make sure that the project will perform as expected. The project will be tested through a variety of scenarios to make sure that any issues related to your team's specifications are identified and remedied.
11. Release and Deploy
Once the code is tested and verified through your preferred testing and environment lifecycles, it can be merged appropriately and promoted/released.
12. Operate
In the operation phase, your teams test the project in your production environment with a high degree of confidence and evaluate how users interact with the new features of the product. Testing helps inform future development cycles and manage the configuration of the production environment.
13. Monitoring
During the monitoring phase, your system will make note of important metrics, such as product usage, feedback, issues, and areas for improvement. This information can be used to improve the project in the next update. Feedback can be beneficial for planning because it helps streamline the development cycle for the future.
Benefits Of Streamlining Software Development With DevOps
Implementing DevOps processes to your business can provide a lot of different benefits. DevOps creates streamlined software development, allowing for increased automation, improving productivity, and decreasing time from development to deployment.
1. Collaboration and Communication
DevOps helps to break down traditional walls that exist for businesses between any development team.
Improving and standardizing your software development processes can encourage communication between teams while fostering an environment of collaboration.
Implementing DevOps services can help make sure that your software development and infrastructure operations are aligned by reducing silos and breaking down barriers.
Creating a partnership between different departments can lead to seamless collaboration, faster sprints, and fewer errors in development.
2. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) is a principal focus of DevOps software development.
With CI/CD, software development and operations teams work together to automate software development.
Software development can be automated through the entire pipeline, from code to deployment.
Using CI/CD in your streamlined software development can help create a smoother deployment process, reduce manual errors, and create a more efficient development process, allowing faster development and deployment.
Using CI/CD helps guarantee fewer errors in production releases because integration testing and automated testing tools helps guarantee that only functioning software is deployed.
With CI/CD, you can deploy software faster, helping you stay ahead of the competition.
3. Infrastructure as Code
DevOps encourages using infrastructure as code, where infrastructure is managed the same way as code.
Infrastructure can have more consistent and repeatable configurations when tracked as code. This allows for more stable and reliable software releases while making it easier to detect manual changes and drift.
With infrastructure as code, you can create configuration files that meet the specifications of your infrastructure.
Using infrastructure can make it easier to edit and distribute configurations with the help of automation. Using configuration files can also help you reduce resources and create a more scalable environment.
4. Automation
Implementing DevOps processes allows you to streamline any repetitive and time-consuming tasks. You can automate things like testing, code review, and deployment.
Automation reduces the risk of errors while also speeding up the development process.
DevOps automation allows your engineers to develop code faster with fewer errors.
5. Monitoring and Feedback
DevOps encourages monitoring and feedback, which can help teams identify and resolve issues quickly.
Improved monitoring allows you to continuously monitor and improve processes while reducing the time it takes to resolve any problems that may arise.
6. Deployment Quality
DevOps provides rapid feedback in each phase of development. Having feedback built into your development process minimizes the amount of manual intervention in production systems.
The checks built into DevOps can shorten feedback cycles and allow you to find issues faster while giving you better insight into the software processes and ensuring code quality.
Getting more insight and feedback as you work can help reduce the risk associated with any software changes and streamline the process of moving applications from development to production.
7. Increased Security
Using DevOps processes allows you to fix issues faster as they come up, which helps businesses create improved security protocols that can help minimize vulnerabilities and increase quality assurance.
Working with DevOps means that you can adjust existing applications easily and quickly with little effort when needed.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can DevOps streamline software development?
Using agile project management methodologies, DevOps can streamline your software development process while reducing the workload on your engineers by automating simple and repetitive tasks while also eliminating some error-prone or sensitive parts of your workflow altogether.
In Closing
Streamlining your software development with DevOps can help improve your software and your software development in many different ways.
Not only can DevOps improve your software and code, but it can also create a better team environment within your organization.