Devops is a practice and movement that emphasizes communication and collaboration of IT operations and software developers. This also automates the process of infrastructure changes and software delivery. Apart from it, its main goal is to establish an environment and culture wherein testing, releasing and building of software can happen more reliably, frequently and rapidly.
Such a common term in the technical community, people sometimes have contradictory and confused impressions of it. But, really, this requires some nuisance to be able to understand it completely.
DevOps Definition
DevOps is now the newest term that emerges from the collision of 2 major trends- the first one is the “agile system administration” while the other one is an expanded understanding of collaboration and its value between operations and development staff in the entire stages of development lifecycle. This is especially in terms of operating and creating a service. This is also prior to the significance of operations in the service-oriented world.
As per the definition of Jez Humble, he clearly explained that DevOps is somehow a cross-disciplinary community of practice and is dedicated to the study of evolving, building and operating changing and rapid resilient systems at a scale. This may already be a good definition but this may be specific and esoteric to internet-based startup types. We can simply define DevOps as something as:
DevOps is considered as a practice of development engineers and operations engineers that participate together in the service lifecycle, from the development process to the design process up to the production support.
Apart from it, this is characterized by the operations staff that makes use of a lot of similar techniques just like the developers. This way, their systems will simply work. As per the techniques, these can range from the use of source control to testing and participating in an Agile developmental process.
“Ops” is considered to be a blanket term intended for system administrators, systems engineers, release engineers, operations staff, network engineers, security professionals and DBA’s. “Dev” is also utilized as shorthand for those developers. But, in reality, it may mean of people exactly involved in the development of the product. This may necessarily include QA, Product and other discipline types.
DevOps and its Benefits
For those companies and businesses that practice DevOps, they have reported some of the significant benefits such as an enhanced customer satisfaction, shorter time-to-market, better quality product, improved productivity, reliable releases, efficiency and more. Apart from it, they also have built the right and the best product through fast experimentation.
DevOps toolchain
Since DevOps means a cultural collaboration and shift between operations and development, there is really no unique tool or toolchain that consist of multiple tools. DevOps tools can also exactly fit into 1 or more categories of code, build, test, package, release, configure and monitor.
Even though there are tools available in the market, others still attempt of identifying the basic tools right through the existing literature. Tools like Puppet, Jenkins, Docker, Vagrant and more are frequently referenced and used in the tooling discussions of DevOps.
— Slimane Zouggari