DevOps is an innovative and vibrant approach for developing and delivering high-quality software. ServiceNow is developing a new vision for how SREsand DevOps solve incidents and enhance service resilience. Utilize the ServiceNow DevOps app with your DevOps toolchain to offer data insights, stimulate change, and enhance visibility in your DevOps ecosystem applying a sole system.
Since its inception more than a decade ago, DevOps has come a long way. Systems administrators continued to take up increasingly productive agile product development teams that were producing higher-quality software significantly more frequently. Teams were improving at delivering software, but impediments remained in other parts of the value stream, such as up-front planning and the deployment and administration of live systems. These impediments created friction between development and operations teams back then, and they still do for many businesses today. The term DevOps was coined by Andrew Clay Shafer and Patrick Debois in 2008, and the idea gained traction with the first DevOpsDays event in Belgium in 2009.
It's not just about the technologies when it comes to DevOps; it's also about how people operate and the processes they utilize. DevOps eliminates the traditional barrier between the technical teams responsible for developing an application or service and those responsible for executing it in production. Processes and activities are aligned with the entire product and service lifecycle and for everything required for delivery and operation.
A single team handles all aspects of the service, including security and testing. Although some functional specialization may still exist in large companies, the process and communication must stay focused on the end-to-end delivery of the complete service. This product-centric perspective might be based on a microservice or a more complicated set of deliverables that make up a release (the circumstances and the end consumer often get that determination). The objective is to make minor changes and iterate more often over time. The new procedures and teams leverage as much automation as feasible and technologies that help the end-to-end consolidation of the product lifecycle, including the critical feedback loop from the consumer to the team.
DevOps is essential because it has the ability to help a company stand out from the competition by allowing it to adapt to business demands more quickly. DevOps is a new and improved platform for building software with enhanced collaboration end-to-end, not just only between operations teams and development, but also a collaboration with disciplines like version control, testing (quality assurance or QA), security (sometimes referred to as DevSecOps), and cross-team collaboration abilities like ChatOps. DevOps leads to higher-quality products and more successful deployments.
DevOps is a best practice at its core. It was founded on the belief that software development teams that collaborate and perform continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) work best for application and service delivery businesses. That implies the software is production-ready after every iteration, no matter how short it is—even if it isn't always deployed in production. To solve a frequent and basic problem with business software development, many firms undergo DevOps transformations. Developers build and test new software in a development environment, which is offline and allows them to diagnose issues, change code, and revise requirements without endangering their company, government agency, or medical or educational institution.
However, when it's an opportunity to implement the new code or software into the real-world context, problems appear because the developer ecosystem is not identical to the ever-evolving production environment. Failures in deployment can result in issues that require a lot of time and money to resolve. Traditionally this issue was made worse by huge quantities of modifications being wrapped up into infrequent releases.
The operations teams are responsible for ensuring that products are deployed reliably in production, with the appropriate checks and balances. Operations and development teams can dispute as they strive to iterate and deliver code changes into production as quickly as feasible. The objective of a DevOps-based delivery pipeline is for developers and operational personnel to:
Organizations can enhance cooperation, work culture, and ultimately productivity by merging development and operations teams and introducing automation. DevOps integration is focused on workflows and automating infrastructure, providing for the consecutive delivery of apps into development, and monitoring application performance regularly.
Automation is a fundamental best practice of businesses that utilize a DevOps model. Automate as many activities as you can, particularly:
Through automated code functions that occur throughout the software development lifecycle, DevOps provides a significant competitive edge. However, automation can only occur if the teams are aware that automation capabilities exist and that many formerly manual activities, such as ITIL change management, are becoming more automated. By relieving developers of administrative duties, automation may significantly improve the developer experience.
DevOps best practice is for developers to write software in small chunks that can be deployed, monitored, tested, and operated out within hours. It is an improvement over the traditional method of writing and testing huge amounts of software code over weeks or months.
Also, if something goes wrong in production, it's easier to remove a minor modification. Whether you're utilizing new cloud-native technologies or more traditional infrastructure, this standard method applies. Not all projects can be delivered in smaller, more regular pieces; sometimes, in a broader DevOps lifecycle, it's still reasonable to aggregate changes into bigger or less-often releases.
While most businesses have significant Agile development expertise and are experimenting with or completely investing in DevOps concepts, some feel DevOps isn't ready for prime time in bigger enterprises. This notion arises from several causes, including the fact that implementing DevOps might need significant changes in the way people, processes, and technology are organized. Another reason is that virtually all major businesses are subject to a slew of rules, particularly when it comes to financial data, personally identifiable information (PII), or healthcare information. Large businesses have tight restrictions in IT operations for delivering application upgrades because of the legal environment.
DevOps will be utilized more frequently to address real-world challenges and business problems as DevOps deployments continue, and as experience and automation grow. People will be more than ready to build truly innovative software features once they understand how they can mix speed and agility with regulation and control. Successful DevOps techniques are based on a deep understanding of this fact, and they may increase productivity by reducing the time it takes to "plan, build, and run" systems.
You can strategically extend the DevOps technique throughout your business, removing the risk of working rapidly while also reducing friction between IT operations and development teams. Large companies that rely on strict controls to ensure business continuity might benefit from new technologies like value stream management (VSM).
A well-run DevOps team iterates fast and deliver advantages in several ways, including shorter, more frequent software releases delivered on time or ahead of schedule, and fewer production issues. Even if defects are discovered in production, they are repaired more rapidly, and the team learns and develops as a result of the data collected through collaboration and value stream management.
DevOps teams that perform well deploy code faster and have fewer errors than those that do not. Because everyone engaged has access to information about the whole lifecycle, the migration to DevOps promotes a continuous improvement attitude across the business. Furthermore, the developing AI capabilities in DevOps will lead to considerable efficiencies and increased dependability through automation.
Although there is a clear business case for DevOps, implementing it may provide a leadership challenge you did not anticipate. Companies must prepare well and persevere to transition from waterfall to Agile software development and then to DevOps. However, the benefits might be substantial.
Many DevOps best practices help in the enhancement of stability. Smaller updates are less likely to cause severe disruptions and can be rapidly and frequently automatically reversed if something goes wrong. DevOps' continuous integration approach ensures that code updates are properly integrated and tested, and the use of policies and tools may assist remove errors as early as possible in the development cycle.
According to the 2019 Puppet State of DevOps study, a robust DevOps foundation makes security implementation easier and more dependable. Security, like code development, testing, and operations, becomes a member of the DevOps team. Collaboration increases as a result of this, and security is built into the process.
Changes can be deployed more rapidly with smaller iterations and combined end-to-end teams, and the teams become more responsive to the business's requirements. The time it takes from the initial concept to the change being implemented in development can be reduced significantly, resulting in faster value.
Improved collaboration and communication enhance all of DevOps' benefits. Developers receive immediate feedback about their work performance in production, while operators obtain a greater understanding of what is being provided and why. Through the support of the entire team, all those involved, including security and quality assurance, have the chance to share and refine their policies. However, the industry case for DevOps is solid, and tools like ServiceNow DevOps make the process easier. There's no reason for any company to be hesitant about using DevOps.
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