What Is DevOps? Everything You Need To Know

DevOps is a blend of development and operations. It is a progressive approach to both software development as well as IT operations. It strongly emphasizes automation, continuous improvement and collaboration. The goal is to accelerate the development and delivery of high-quality software. The term what is DevOps has many definition in itself.

As it integrates development and operations, DevOps tends to break down silos. This enables quicker issue resolution, faster development cycles and increased reliable releases. Best practices here include infrastructure as code (IaC), monitoring and logging, and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD). All these practices aid companies in responding timely to customer needs and market changes. Hence, helps in maintaining performance and stability.

DevOps enhances technical efficiency along with fostering a collaborative culture. It shares responsibility for driving business success and innovation. This blog explores its history, architecture, workflow and much more.

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What is DevOps? An Introduction To DevOps

DevOps is a worldly known and popular methodology. It combines development and operations to improve efficiency, speed and collaboration in the delivery of high-quality software. It mends the gap prevalent between development and operations teams. It has fostered a culture of continuous delivery, automation and continuous integration.

DevOps practices are aimed at streamlining the lifecycle of software development. It begins at coding and includes testing, deployment and monitoring. It uses processes and tools like automated testing, infrastructure as code (IaC) and version control. All these ensure improved system reliability, quicker response to issues and faster releases. It accelerates development cycles and improves collaboration and shared responsibility across teams.

A Brief History of DevOps

DevOps emerged due to the increasing necessity for agility in IT operations and software development. It can be traced back to the beginning of the 2000s. This is when software development methodologies such as Agile began to emphasize iterative development and collaboration. The disconnect prevalent between operations and development teams often resulted in operational inefficiencies and slow releases.

The term DevOps first became popularized in 2009. It was Patrick Debois who was behind the organizing of the first ever DevOpsDays conference held in Ghent, Belgium. This particular event resulted in operations professionals and developers coming together. They discussed the challenges faced by a company due to siloed teams, emphasizing on the imperatives for a more integrated approach.

The evolution of DevOps has witnessed some key growth points.

2008-2009: This was the time when the rise of Lean and Agile methodologies came forth. They highlighted the imperativeness for more collaborative and faster operations and development processes.

2009: This is the year that saw the first ever DevOpsDays conference. It formally marked the introduction of DevOps to the world as a concept.

2010s: During these coming couple of years, the world saw a widespread adoption of practices and tools. These included continuous delivery (CD), infrastructure as code, and continuous integration (CI). All these led to rapid growth of DevOps.

2013: This is the year when 'The Phoenix Project' was published. Written by Kevin Behr, George Spafford and Gene Kim, it acted as a catalyst in popularizing DevOps practices and principles.

Related Article- Python For DevOps- A Complete Guide For Beginners

What Was Life Like before DevOps?

Before DevOps came into the picture, the development and operations scene was usually characterized by inefficiencies and silos. These teams generally worked in isolation, which led to a disconnect, hindering productivity and collaboration.

Development Cycle

• Waterfall Methodology: Most of the teams followed the Waterfall model. Here, development phases occurred in a sequence. It was a rigid process that made it difficult to adjust to the changes. Hence, it led to lengthy development cycles.

• Delayed Feedback: Since developers had very limited interaction with operations, delayed feedback was quite common. This led to late discovery of bugs and issues, which made the process costlier and more time-consuming.

Operations Challenges

• Manual Processes: Operations team heavily relied on manual processes for different steps like deployment, maintenance and configuration. This heightened the risk of human error and resulted in inconsistent environments.

• Bottlenecks: As the deployments were infrequent and included elaborate manual intervention, bottlenecks were created. This error-prone and slow process led to delayed releases and frustration among developers.

Communication and Collaboration

• Siloed Teams: There was an extensive lack of collaboration between these two teams. It led to miscommunication and consequent blame-shifting. Both teams had their own priorities and objectives, which led to inefficiencies and conflicts.

• Reactive Problem-Solving: More often than not, issues were addressed reactively instead of proactively. Ops teams spent a great amount of time firefighting, wherein they could have optimized performance and reliability.

When Did DevOps Become a Thing?

DevOps began to come into the limelight in the late 2000s. This was because people wanted a solid response to the inefficiencies and limitations of the then-existing development and operations practices.

The term DevOps gained popularity around 2009. This can be credited mostly to Patrick Debois. He was the one who organized history’s first ever DevOpsDays conference. This is the event that brought developers and operations professionals under a roof. They got down to discussing the challenges arising due to siloed teams. They emphasized the need to explore more collaborative and efficient approaches.

Key Milestones:

2007-2008: During this time, Agile development practices emphasized the need to adopt better collaborative and iterative approaches. This set the stage for the rise of DevOps principles.

2009: The first ever DevOpsDays conference in Ghent was the formal unveiling of the concept of DevOps. This event led to the rise of a global community, which was entirely dedicated to eradicating the barriers between these two teams.

Early 2010s: The adoption of various tools came forth. Puppet and Chef for configuration management, Docker for containerization and Jenkins for continuous integration led to the practical DevOps implementation.

2013: Kevin Behr, George Spafford and Gene Kim published their book titled The Phoenix Project. This led to further popularity of DevOps as it illustrated its principles via a compelling business novel.

Conclusion For What Is DevOps

This blog has provided a complete understanding on DevOps, including its history, workflow, and much more. It is an increasingly popular methodology that brings operators and developers into a single unit. It was firstly introduced in the early 20's and got recognition in 2009. It is expected to grow significantly in upcoming years.

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