Businesses that want to maintain a competitive advantage can no longer afford to embark on lengthy journeys of software development lifecycles. These journeys are extremely demanding in time and money. In most organizations Project Managers, Designers, Developers, Testers, and Operations all have different roles and work independently making it difficult and challenging to transition from one cycle to another. Specifically, Developers are responsible for new features delivery, and Operations for applications stability and uptime. This setup is not ideal for an agile environment where rapid delivery is key. Operations are busy keeping applications up and running at all times, upgrading systems, maintaining stability, monitoring performance and scaling based off of demand. While developers are focused on implementing new features which makes it difficult to create a collaborative environment where rapid delivery is possible.
DevOps Days was the name of a conference held by Patrick Debois and Andrew Shafer to talk about these complications. The name “DevOps” stuck and is now used to describe the practice born to bring development and operations together. It is a culture that puts emphasis on the collaboration between all parties while simultaneously automating deployments, delivery and infrastructure changes. If adopted, this practice will create an environment where developmenting, testing, and releasing become seamless and rapid. DevOps introduces consistency and reliability across environments since Developers and Operations are working together to define and script the infrastructure making it possible to move entire systems from one infrastructure to another or one region to another seamlessly. This collaboration simplifies the release process and achieves stable deployments with little, if any, surprises since developers are thinking about the supporting infrastructure while operations are considering development methods. The core principle of DevOps is to address the efficiency lack in the workflow of software development lifecycle. DevOps orients the thinking of developers beyond simply developing and testing features. They now consider the supporting infrastructure, performance, operating systems, scalability and existing workflows — previously only thought of by operations.
Today leaders in the cloud infrastructure provide multiple services designed to streamline the software development process. These services allow businesses to reduce the cost and risk of building new applications. DevOps standardizes processes, increases agility, and simplifies automation, to rapidly build and deliver reliable products. By provisioning and managing infrastructure, application deployment, performance monitoring and software release automation, the development life cycle has been transformed from a non-collaborative, labor-intensive process to a simple, cost effective, efficient operation.
