Overview of DevOps

DevOps is all about the culture of an organization, processes, and technology to develop communication and collaboration between development and IT operations teams to manage the application life cycle more effectively than the existing ways of doing it. We often tend to work based on patterns to find reusable solutions from similar kinds of problems or challenges.

Over the years, achievements and failed experiments, best practices, automation scripts, configuration management tools, and methodologies have become an integral part of DevOps culture.

It helps to define practices for a way of designing, a way of developing, a way of testing, a way of setting up resources, a way of managing environments, a way of configuration management, a way of deploying an application, a way of gathering feedback, a way of code improvements, and a way of doing innovations. 

The following are some of the visible benefits that can be achieved by implementing DevOps practices.

DevOps culture is considered an innovative package to integrate Dev and Ops teams in an effective manner that includes components such as continuous build integration, continuous testing, cloud resource provisioning, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, continuous monitoring, continuous feedback, continuous improvement, and continuous innovation to make application delivery faster, as per the demands of agile methodology. Evolving a culture is not an overnight journey. It takes a long time. However, there are also confusions regarding what DevOps is, hence, often only continuous integration or configuration management practices are considered as a DevOps practices implementation. It is a scenario similar to that of the elephant and five blind men, where every man touches a specific part of his body and assumes that to be an elephant.

However, it is not only the development and operations teams that are involved. The testing team, business analysts, build engineers, automation team, cloud team, and many other stakeholders are involved in this exercise of evolving the existing culture.

The DevOps culture is not much different than the organization culture, which has shared values and behavioral aspects. It needs adjustment in mindsets and processes to align with new technology and tools.