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What is DevOps?

Learn more about what DevOps is and see the main practices adopted by leading technology companies in Brazil and around the world.

October 30, 2019

Overview:

* Implementing DevOps in your company basically means bringing development and operations teams together so they work collaboratively and agilely to deliver features and projects;

* Today there are six key DevOps practices widely used worldwide: continuous integration, continuous delivery, microservices, infrastructure as code, monitoring and logging, and communication and collaboration;

* Learn more about each of them and see why you should implement DevOps in your company.

Having a development team with a DevOps culture is essential for delivering projects continuously and with agility.

With a set of practices consolidated around the world, this development approach has been gaining space because it automates a large part of the process, reducing work that used to be done manually.

But do you know what DevOps is? What are the main practices?

Find the answers to these questions below!

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So, what is DevOps?

The word “DevOps” is a combination of two well-known terms in technology: “development” and “operations”.

However, DevOps is more than just joining two words. This way of working requires frequent communication to integrate software development and IT infrastructure teams.

In practice, this makes it possible to build a more efficient agile development culture and speed up execution, including security, team collaboration, and data analysis.

In addition, other parts of software development are impacted as well—such as the production environment, automations, and high-quality platform design—always with the goal of improving responsiveness to users and delivering value.

With DevOps, the adopted approaches aim to ensure value delivery to customers and can represent new features, improvements, or bug-fix release cycles.

Beyond communication between teams, DevOps makes the process more collaborative, aligned with the company’s culture, and structured around testing and releasing solutions.

Therefore, DevOps changes traditional management and how processes are conducted. Code and infrastructure are subject to constant changes—an important and more dynamic factor when we talk about modern software delivery.

How does DevOps work?

DevOps works by bringing development and operations teams together so they no longer work autonomously and separately.

With that, the whole production and life cycle of a web system or app is handled jointly—from development and tests to deployment and operations.

During the process, both teams start using more efficient automation practices and methods, aiming to speed up processes that were traditionally manual and considerably slow.

To be successful, different tools available in the market are used for each stage, helping the team operate and develop systems reliably, securely, and quickly.

These tools also provide more independence for tasks that would normally require help from other teams.

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What are the main DevOps practices?

1. Continuous integration and continuous delivery

One of the main DevOps practices is continuous integration.

This software development practice is based on merging developers’ changes into a central repository, reducing the manual work required in the code integration process.

In addition to making bug fixes easier, continuous integration is adopted to find and investigate errors more quickly, reduce the time needed to validate and release new software updates, and improve product quality.

Working alongside it is another practice known as continuous delivery.

Often seen as an evolution of the previous model, in continuous delivery code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared. This helps ensure the code is ready to enter production and development environments safely.

2. Microservices

To further simplify the development of apps and software, another widely used practice is the microservices architecture. With it, you can build small independent services that communicate through well-defined APIs.

Besides being an architecture that is straightforward to implement, microservices can increase the scalability of projects and provide more agility for teams.

That happens because when teams work within a smaller context, they have more autonomy to act independently and faster.

3. Infrastructure as code and monitoring

Another practice frequently associated with DevOps is infrastructure as code. Its main characteristic is provisioning and managing development infrastructure using software development techniques such as continuous integration and version control.

With that stored in the cloud, developers can interact with the infrastructure of a system at scale and in an automated way, instead of installing and configuring everything manually.

In other words, just as software , apps, and web systems can be developed using DevOps tools, infrastructure can be managed the same way.

In addition, log monitoring is essential to understand app performance and the user’s final experience with your product.

In the technology world, managing and analyzing data is key to knowing where problems are and what needs to be adjusted.

Because of that, there are already DevOps tools that help with this process, without requiring everything to be done manually.

4. Communication and collaboration

Last but not least, communication and collaboration among a company’s professionals are essential for DevOps to actually deliver results.

Especially in larger teams, everyone needs to be aligned on task execution so that everything can be delivered within an agile timeframe.

Building a culture of using communication and information-sharing tools makes project development much easier.

And the benefits don’t stay only within the tech team. Other areas such as marketing and sales also gain from better alignment with the company’s goals and the projects under development.