DevOps: Practices
Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration is a software development practice where developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository, after which automated builds and tests are run. The key goals of continuous integration are to find and address bugs quicker, improve software quality, and reduce the time for validating and release updates.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous Delivery is a practice where code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a release to production. It expands upon continuous integration by deploying all code changes to a testing environment and/or a production environment after the build stage. When continuous delivery is implemented properly, developers will always have a deployment-ready build artifact that has passed through a standardized test process.
Automation:
In terms of technologies Devops fully rely on automation. An automation platform gives you the ability to describe your entire technology stack as executable code. DevOps practitioners use automation to:
Standardize development, test and production environments.
Effectively deploy and manage cloud resources.
Eliminate error-prone, time-consuming manual tasks.
Improve cooperation between development and operations.
Implement automated release pipelines.
Automation enables velocity, scale, consistency and feedback.
Version control
Version control – systems are software that help you track changes you make in your code over time. As you edit your code, you tell the version control system to take a snapshot of your files. The version control system saves that snapshot permanently so you can recall it later if you need it. Without version control, you’re tempted to keep multiple copies of code on your computer. This is dangerous-it’s easy to change or delete a file in the wrong copy of code, potentially losing work. Version control systems solve this problem by managing all versions of your code but presenting you with a single version at a time.
Configuration Management
Developers and system administrators use code to automate operating system and host configuration, operational tasks, and more. The use of code makes configuration changes repeatable and standardized. It makes developers free from manually configuring operating systems, system applications, or server software.
Monitoring and Logging
Organizations monitor metrics and logs to see how application and infrastructure performance impacts the experience of their product’s end user. By capturing, categorizing, and then analyzing data and companies understand how changes or updates impact users. Active monitoring becomes increasingly urgent as services must be available 24/7 and as application and infrastructure update frequency increases. Creating alerts or performing real-time analysis of this data also helps organizations more proactively monitor their services.
Communication and Collaboration.
We mentioned that technologically Devops fully rely on automation. And socially they rely on collaboration.
Increased communication and collaboration in a company is one of the key cultural aspects of DevOps. The use of DevOps tooling and automation of the software delivery process establishes collaboration by physically bringing together the workflows and responsibilities of development and operations. Building on top of that, these teams set strong cultural norms around information sharing and facilitating communication through the use of chat applications, issue or project tracking systems, and wikis. This helps to speed up communication across developers, operations, and even other teams like marketing or sales, allowing all parts of the organization to align more closely on goals and projects.
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