DevOps is relatively new practice in Tech World, and right now it is booming in the Tech World. Some people say DevOps is intersection between Development & Operations and other say it is agile process; is it so, if not then what exactly is DevOps? Why so much hype about it? In this blog we are going to talk about it, in addition to this we will also see what mindset you need to achieve new heights in this field & how DevOps increases the velocity & productivity of any organization.

Understanding DevOps

DevOps is derived from Development & Operations. Although there is no official definition of DevOps, but that doesn't mean it has no definition at all. It can be defined as:

A cultural practice within an organization by development & operations team to use each other's tools in order to smooth out & increase speed of the Software Delivery Process.

Core DevOps principles

We have four main principles of DevOps, to increases efficiency of any organization.

• Automate Software Development Cycle.
• Better collaboration & communication between different teams involved in this process.
• Continuous improvement.
• Focus on needs of user with short feedback loops.

Application Release Process

In order to understand DevOps with more clarity first we need to understand Application Release Process.

If you look at above image carefully then you will understand, in any application release process there are mainly these steps are involved.

First we think about building any application, after idea we start gathering all the requirements & define all functionality it will have then we start coding & implementation part of our application after completion of coding part we test it to check if there is any bug on our software or not. When you're sure that there is no bug in application then you configure server for deployment of application, for deployment of application on public server we need to build & package our application in some form of executable form so that it can run on server. Now after all these process our application can be deployed on public server & user can use it.

After you've deployed your application on public server then you continuously monitor your application to figure out if there is any problem faced by user, or if still there is any bug or is application able to handle high loads or you want to add new features to your application; if you found any issue that users are facing then you need to fix them. You continuously observe your application & make continuous improvement to your product by repeating same process again & again this makes an endless loop of improvement also known as continuous delivery of changes.

DevOps is all about making process of continuous delivery or infinite cycle of improvements fast & with minimal bugs.

Why DevOps?

• Better collaboration & communication among team members.
• Less failures of application, low errors & bugs.
• Reliability & Security of product increases.
• Increase in speed of application release process.
• If you face any issue or failure in system then you can recover quickly.
• Overall productivity & speed of organization increases.

Things you need to keep in mind

• Always prioritize people over process over tools.
• Developers want to deliver features as quickly as possible & Operations want to maintain stability of system so, DevOps create synchronization between these two. So, that speed of delivering product can be increased.
• Don't focus too much on learning tools, understand mindset & concepts.
• Always keep in mind what problem DevOps tries to solve.

Summary

DevOps on high level can be considered as combination of Development & Operations. In more simpler words, DevOps is mindset/culture that uses some technology in order to promote collaboration between Development & Operations teams to deploy code to production in automated way. Goal of DevOps is to increase overall speed of an organization & with minimum bugs & errors when it comes to delivering product.