What is DevOps?

The word DevOps is a combination of the terms development and operations.
According to Wikipedia, "DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). It aims to shorten the system's development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. DevOps is complementary with Agile software development; several DevOps aspects came from the Agile way of working."

DevOps is intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production, while ensuring high quality.

DevOps ensures:

• Speed: DevOps practices let you move at the velocity you need to innovate faster, adapt to changing markets better, and become more efficient at driving business results.
• Security: You can adopt a DevOps model without sacrificing security by using automated, integrated security testing tools.
• Reliability: DevOps practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery can ensure the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes, so you can reliably deliver at a more rapid pace while maintaining an optimum experience for end users.
• Rapid delivery: When you increase the pace of releases, you can improve your product faster and build competitive advantage.
• Improved collaboration: Under a DevOps model, developers and operations teams collaborate closely, share responsibilities, and combine their workflows. This reduces inefficiencies and saves time.

How does DevOps work?

DevOps is a methodology meant to improve the quality of a software throughout the software development lifecycle. One can visualize DevOps as an infinite loop containing the following steps: plan, code, build, test, release, deploy, operate, monitor, again plan for new changes, which resets the loop.

What problems do DevOps solve?

Each company faces its own challenges. One of them is the delay in releasing the new (updated) versions of their product. These updates take longer time due to separate teams for development and operations, leading to miss-communication between them. To build viable software, development teams must understand the production environment and test their code in realistic conditions. DevOps fills the bridge between a developer and a maintainer, as both the departments gets merged into single.

DevOps benefits and challenges:

DevOps benefits include the following:

• fewer silos and increased communications between IT groups
• faster time to market for software
• rapid improvement based on feedback
• less downtime
• improvement to the entire software delivery pipeline through builds, validations and deployment
• less menial work, thanks to automation
• streamlined development processes through increased responsibility and code ownership in development
• broader roles and skills.

However, DevOps challenges abound:

• organizational and IT departmental changes, including new skills and job roles
• expensive tools and platforms, including training and support to use them effectively
• development and IT tool proliferation
• unnecessary, fragile or unsafe automation
• scaling DevOps across multiple projects and teams