The term DevOps was formed by combining development "Development" and operations "Operations", which provides a starting point for understanding what people typically mean when they say "DevOps". DevOps is not a process, a technology or a standard. Instead, many followers refer to DevOps as a "culture." The term "DevOps movement" is also often used when discussing topics such as adoption rates and trends for the future.
DevOps has become an umbrella term for the processes, culture, and mindset that shorten the software development lifecycle by using rapid feedback loops to deliver features, fixes, and updates more frequently. In this, you can also see the closeness to the general "Agile" movement in the software environment.
DevOps is a way development organizations work with cross-functional teams, so DevOps starts with culture and moves towards tooling and automation.
6 pillars can be defined for DevOps:
Instead of pointing fingers at each other, development and IT, operations work together.
DevOps relies heavily on automation, and that means you need tools. Tools that you build. Tools that you buy. Open source tools. Proprietary tools. DevOps relies on toolchains to automate large parts of the software development and delivery process.
The continuous integration principle of agile development has a cultural impact on the development group. Developers are forced to frequently integrate their work with the work of other developers, exposing integration issues and conflicts much earlier than in waterfall development.
While Continuous Integration and Delivery get the lion's share of coverage, Continuous Testing is slowly finding its place as a critical part of DevOps. CI can be difficult to exist without CT, especially the larger the company that deploys it.
Code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for release to the production environment. In addition, it extends Continuous Integration by deploying all code changes to a test environment.
In a DevOps environment, bugs need to be found and fixed in real time. With all the automated builds and deployments, monitoring of these components must also be continuous and, in the best case, automated. Like testing, monitoring starts in development. The same tools that monitor the production environment can also be used in development to detect performance issues before they occur in production. Two types of monitoring are needed for DevOps: Server monitoring and application performance monitoring.
In practice, of course, using monitoring tools alone is not enough; in the event of an alert, this information must also inform the right part of the development team so that errors can be corrected and downtimes avoided. This is where iLert's Uptime platform comes in, with convenient roster management and countless notification options for critical alerts.
