What Is DevOps?

DevOps comes to life through three interconnected elements: the DevOps team, the DevOps lifecycle, and the DevOps toolchain. The team is itself a major innovation, bringing together two groups that may have once had an adversarial relationship. The collaborative nature of DevOps succeeds, however, due to the process and toolchain. Using the toolchain, the team can execute the DevOps lifecycle. An essential part of the toolchain is a version control system, which helps track code changes and maintain high-quality, testable software. The practices of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are typically part of the DevOps process. With CI/CD, the DevOps teams integrate new code into the code base and deliver updated software to production on a continuous basis.

Stakeholders in DevOps like to represent the process using the metaphor of the infinite loop. The classic figure-eight design depicts an endless, iterative process that comprises the DevOps lifecycle. Although software development, testing, and releasing is a linear process, with DevOps, there's no particular starting or ending point. It’s always on, always iterating.

The ethos of DevOps is “collaborate and communicate,” which is the complete opposite of “throw it over the wall.” The resulting lifecycle puts these principles into action. The stages of the DevOps lifecycle are discover, plan, build (code), test, deploy, operate, and observe, followed by continuous feedback, which informs the discover stage — and the lifecycle begins anew:

• Discover: Explore and prioritize software ideas, seeking alignment with strategy and customer experience.
• Plan: Break work into small, manageable pieces that add incremental value.
• Build: Write the code itself, with tools like Git enabling branching, merging, and rewriting the repository history.
• Test: Continuously run tests to improve software quality, often including the testing of application programming interfaces (APIs) that link the application with other software and data sources.
• Deploy: Continuously release new features into production using automation.
• Operate: Manage the complete delivery of the software to end users, deploying onto infrastructure — a process that includes design, configuration, and implementation of production environments.
• Observe: Identify and resolve issues that affect the software’s performance and end-user experience — with automatic team notifications regarding issues. Quality assurance plays a key role here by aligning development and operations teams, and ensuring software reliability.

Continuous feedback: Evaluate each release and report on ways to improve future releases.

DevOps practices can vary significantly depending on the type of IT environment you’re working with. While cloud native applications may benefit from built-in scalability and automation, on-premises systems may require more manual intervention, and hybrid setups combine the best (and worst) of both worlds. A platform-driven approach to DevOps emphasizes the importance of self-service processes for managing various workflows and infrastructure, including development environments, to enable agile and efficient collaboration. Effective infrastructure provisioning is also crucial for automating the entire DevOps lifecycle, streamlining operations from deployment to monitoring and testing. Here’s how DevOps adapts across these different environments:

DevOps in cloud native environments

Cloud native applications, particularly those running in platforms like Akamai Cloud, AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, benefit greatly from DevOps. Cloud platforms offer extensive automation tools — such as continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, serverless computing, and container orchestration with Kubernetes — which simplify the DevOps lifecycle.

DevOps in hybrid cloud environments

Hybrid cloud environments mix on-prem and cloud based services, making the implementation of DevOps more complex. Teams must manage security, compliance, and data flow between environments. In hybrid setups, DevOps teams often leverage containers and orchestration tools to create a seamless interface between cloud and on-prem resources.

DevOps in on-premises systems

Implementing DevOps for on-premises infrastructures requires more customization and manual processes than cloud native environments. However, tools like Jenkins for automation and Terraform for infrastructure as code (IaC) can help create consistency and repeatability even for legacy systems. Ensuring smooth deployment processes, managing dependencies, and maintaining high-performance infrastructure are more resource-intensive but still highly valuable.

DevOps comes to life through three interconnected elements: the DevOps team, the DevOps lifecycle, and the DevOps toolchain. The team is itself a major innovation, bringing together two groups that may have once had an adversarial relationship. The collaborative nature of DevOps succeeds, however, due to the process and toolchain. Using the toolchain, the team can execute the DevOps lifecycle. An essential part of the toolchain is a version control system, which helps track code changes and maintain high-quality, testable software. The practices of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are typically part of the DevOps process. With CI/CD, the DevOps teams integrate new code into the code base and deliver updated software to production on a continuous basis.

At the heart of DevOps is a culture that promotes collaboration, transparency, and shared responsibility between development teams and operations. DevOps culture emphasizes breaking down the silos that traditionally existed between these two groups, fostering a continuous learning environment where both teams work together to deliver software more quickly, efficiently, and with higher quality. In a DevOps culture, everyone is accountable for the success of the product, from writing the code to ensuring it runs smoothly in production.

The culture also promotes automation, continuous feedback, and iterative improvements. Development teams are encouraged to adopt open source tools and processes to streamline their workflows and enhance collaboration across teams. High-performance organizations that implement DevOps culture tend to see improvements not only in technical efficiency but also in team morale, as members are empowered to take ownership of the entire application lifecycle.

Some high-performing DevOps teams also incorporate various cybersecurity steps into the lifecycle. This is known as DevSecOps. Security steps might include things like testing for vulnerable code, API security testing, and adding data security countermeasures like encryption. DevSecOps is intended to produce secure software, while pure DevOps is all about efficiency and speed. The two goals aren't necessarily in conflict, though security may create more steps in the lifecycle.

Efficient or not, DevSecOps or something like it's usually a necessity. Security problems are bad in general, but they're particularly troublesome for the developer team that has to fix them if a vulnerability gets out into production. Multiple studies have shown cost and time savings when addressing security issues prior to production. And it’s quite inefficient and slow to have security practices be a stand-alone gating factor that occurs after the DevOps cycle is ready to release the code.

Done right, DevOps has proven itself to be a source of advantage for businesses and other entities that produce software. Speed is one of the biggest benefits of DevOps. By integrating teams and processes, the whole cycle gets faster. At the same time, improved collaboration and communication generally make the software better. There are fewer trade-offs of “I can give you speed or quality, but not both.” With DevOps, you get both.

Team morale improves, too. This may not seem like such an important issue, but given the difficulty that companies have recruiting and retaining developer talent, it’s a big plus. In addition to making people less stressed out, the collaborative nature of DevOps can identify opportunities to develop new features that no one has thought of before.

DevOps matters because it is a critical enabler of digital transformation. It is possible to undertake transformative technology projects without DevOps, but in reality, the speed and quality inherent in the DevOps model are essential for successful digital transformation. DevOps translates into faster delivery of business value through software.

DevOps has changed the software field for the better. It’s part of a bigger picture, one that includes agile methodologies, CI/CD, open APIs, and concepts like containers and microservices architecture. Not every organization is ready to embrace it right away, however. Getting to success with DevOps is an evolutionary process that requires change management. Indeed, it can be challenging. For some organizations, too, the waterfall technique is still viable, or even preferable, for certain software projects. For organizations ready and willing to adopt it, however, the potential for DevOps is clear.

A critical aspect of DevOps is its ability to optimize the development process by promoting automation, continuous integration, and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices. By automating repetitive tasks such as testing, building, and deploying code, DevOps reduces the potential for human error and speeds up the software delivery pipeline. This optimization allows development teams to focus on creating high-performance applications that meet user needs more effectively.

Open source tools such as Jenkins, Git, and Docker are commonly used in DevOps to automate workflows and enable teams to track code changes, run tests, and deploy software updates in real time. This streamlined approach improves overall efficiency and reduces the time it takes to push new features to production, ultimately benefiting the business by delivering more value to users faster.

Kubernetes has become an essential tool in the DevOps toolkit due to its powerful ability to manage containerized applications across multiple environments. With Kubernetes, development teams can automate the deployment, scaling, and management of their applications, ensuring consistency between the development and production environments. This level of automation and standardization optimizes the software development process and accelerates time to market.

By leveraging Kubernetes, teams can focus on writing and optimizing code infrastructure rather than worrying about the underlying infrastructure. The platform supports the continuous delivery model inherent to DevOps by ensuring that changes can be deployed seamlessly, with minimal manual intervention. Additionally, Kubernetes’ open source nature aligns with the broader DevOps philosophy of collaboration and innovation.