What Is DevOps?

In summary, DevOps is the combination of factors whose mission is to increase companies' capacity and speed of delivering applications and services, without sacrificing quality. To do so, this culture bases its actions on 3 pillars: cultural philosophy, tools, and agile practices. Through them, companies are able to optimize and improve their products at increasingly accelerated paces, unlike those that persist in using outdated development and management processes.

The result? Increasingly fast and high-quality deliveries, generating greater satisfaction on the part of customers and greater scalability and competitiveness for companies.

In an increasingly competitive market, with demanding consumers eager for change, DevOps has ceased to be just a competitive advantage and has become an indispensable operating model for companies seeking growth and greater prominence within their field of activity.

DevOps in Practice

The first impact that the DevOps culture brought to companies was the change in the distribution of teams. This is because, unlike a few years ago, in order to implement a DevOps model, it is necessary for the development and operations teams to work together. In some situations, they may even merge, forming a single team.

However, simply bringing the teams together is not enough. To optimize processes, it is also necessary for the practices present in the development process to become increasingly automated, moving away from the slow and bureaucratic processes that hinder the agile delivery of products. To do so, these teams can use various technologies and tools, which will be applied in the operation and development of products.

These technologies make it possible for team members to work independently at various stages of construction, such as during the implementation of code or the provisioning of infrastructure, which in traditional models required the involvement of several areas, making the process more time-consuming and bureaucratic.

DevOps Practices

As we can see, DevOps is a broad term that involves several practices that, when used correctly, generate an improvement in deliveries.

See below a little about each of them:

Continuous Integration

One of the most important practices in DevOps, continuous integration has as its central goals the reduction of the time invested in validations and releases of new updates for software and greater agility in the investigation of errors and bugs.

To do so, developers must gather any and all code changes within a central repository, so that, from there, new versions of the software can be created and tested.

Continuous Delivery

Working in parallel with this integration, continuous delivery further expands the agility in the delivery of new products and updates, through automated creation mechanisms and testing processes.

Microservices

Through the breakdown of products into microservices, each of the functionalities within these products can be developed or updated independently. To do so, integration through application programming interfaces (APIs) is necessary, enabling communication between the different services of the product. In this model, programming languages or frameworks can be used for different functionalities within the same product.

Infrastructure as Code

This model makes it possible for developers and system administrators to work programmatically and at scale, without the need for manual installation or configuration of resources. This practice is carried out through the provisioning and management of code and software development techniques.

In this way, engineers can work on the infrastructure of products using code similar to that used in applications, generating greater speed in the implementation of regulatory standards,

Monitoring and Logging

With logs, companies can monitor and evaluate the performance of applications, and how they impact the user experience with the product. Through these logs, it is also possible to understand more clearly how updates or changes may affect users in terms of usability.

Regarding maintenance, with increasingly frequent use and applications operating 24/7, this practice makes it easier for companies to identify the root cause of problems or improper changes in the functioning of products.

Communication and Collaboration

The increase in communication and collaboration within a company is one of the main cultural aspects arising from DevOps. The use of development tools and the automation of the software delivery process require greater collaboration, since it physically brings together the workflows and responsibilities of development and operations.

Based on this, these teams define solid cultural norms regarding the sharing of information, in addition to facilitating communication through the use of chat applications, issue or project tracking systems, and wikis. This helps streamline communication between developers, operations, and even between different teams, such as marketing or sales, allowing all parts of the company to align with the company's goals and projects.

We hope this article has been useful! See you in the next post.