DEVOPS DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGY & PRINCIPLES

DevOps Development methodology emerged in 2009 in response to the ascendant complexity of the software development process, the increasingly disparate teams, and the ever-growing tech stack. The operations and development teams used to function as separate units in their disconnected environments. The process of transferring the project from the developers to IT operations used to contend with friction and endless back and forth.

The interdepartmental inefficiency, blame-shifting, and unavoidable business damage in the product release stage worked as a powerful catalyst for the onset of DevOps software development methodology.

This article is a deep dive into the basics of the DevOps principles, advantages, and challenges—alongside some insights about what DevOps and Agile have in common.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a collaborative framework of software development that enables tightly knit cooperation between the development and IT operations at all stages, resulting in faster releases, better quality code, and higher scalability through automation, continuous integration (CI), and continuous delivery (CD) principles.

What is Agile?

Agile is a collaborative approach to product development that enables faster product release of higher quality by seeking stakeholder feedback frequently and regularly and integrating it right away. This method suggests that any mistakes or blockers are addressed on a weekly basis. Agile’s iterative approach minimizes time wasted pursuing a faulty technical decision, as product ownership is high due to smaller teams and their embedded observability.

What’s the Difference Between DevOps and Agile?

Agile and DevOps are different at their core, even though they have many commonalities. In fact, DevOps was founded based on the principles of efficient iterated collaboration of its predecessor.

While the Agile principles can be applied to any product development projects requiring team collaboration and frequent stakeholders’ approval, DevOps is limited to software development only. 

Agile is focused on delivering the product in batches, proactively integrating the feedback from decision-makers every few weeks. DevOps, on the other hand, has more to do with the technical side of the SDLC, as it uses concepts like infrastructure as code (IaC), CI, CD, and automation to breach the gap between development and IT operations.

The Genesis of DevOps Development Methodology

These preconditions formed a solid foundation for the emergence of this type of collaborative framework:

1. The software solutions grew more complex, demanding that more processes be coordinated between parties managing the software product at different stages.
2. The technical stack kept evolving. Different departments had to learn more tools and master new platforms. The knowledge gap between the three siloed teams of developers, IT operations, and testers made the divide even wider.
3. The mere size of the solutions that businesses needed to be developed grew exponentially. This shift in demand made coordination and observability even more critical to the project’s success [later monolith solutions could no longer be sustainable and microservices architecture was born].
4. With the emergence of cloud computing, the progress that software development evolution brought to the market leaders became available to SMBs in a SaaS shape. The DevOps culture was even more necessary for seamless IaaS and PaaS management.

Now let’s review the main technical concepts and DevOps principles more closely.

The DevOps Development Methodology & Its Key Concepts

As DevOps is a framework of collaboration and a specific approach to software development, it’s rather abstract to a newcomer. Let’s break it down into smaller digestible rather finite technical concepts.  

These elements are fundamental to the overall efficiencies of the DevOps development methodology.

Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment [CI, CD, & CD]

Continuous integration is a software development approach that entails frequent code releases by developers into the main branch through a version control system. This way, the code is constantly built and tested through automation. If there is a bug that needs fixing, it goes back to the software developer. But if the code passes the automated build stage tests, it is moved further into the testing environments.

Continuous delivery takes the automation of frequent releases to the next step, where a code is built into the software, and tested in a few environments [for example, QA and Stage environments] before it requires a manual human review and approval to be pushed into the production environment.

Continuous deployment is a fully automated process where the code engineered by developers goes through the build, test, and deploy stages automatically without any human approval or review at all. Even in such cases when the companies have full confidence in the automated testing quality to release the code without manual approval, the new releases are usually deployed to a fraction of the user base [2–5%] and closely monitored before full deployment. 

Benefits of CI / CD in Agile DevOps Development Methodology

As a build, testing, and even deployment can be programmed to run on a continuous basis, developers can release code often, minimizing the “merge hell” and its negative consequences. These are benefits that companies that integrate and develop their code continuously enjoy:

1. Frequent releases that lead to happier customers and stakeholders.
2. High-quality code, as bugs are caught early in the process.
3. Less costly development, as many of the infrastructure automation tools are open source, and hiring a DevOps engineer to configure them and monitor costs less compared to manning manual processes.
4. Faster time-to-market, as features are tested and deployed frequently, allows for timely feedback and their integration back into the code.

Similarly, testing and monitoring processes are conducted in a continuous manner under the DevOps methodology principles. Let’s review in detail.

Continuous Monitoring & Alerting in DevOps Development

Continuous Monitoring is another key DevOps practice, which commands that IT systems be monitored on an ongoing basis with the help of automation to identify any known performance issues or security vulnerabilities. A few facets of the IT systems can be monitored in this manner, including the network, application layer, and infrastructure.

Any irregular patterns flagged by monitoring tools can be programmed to create an alert for respective departments for manual checks and fixing.

Benefits of Continuous Monitoring in the DevOps Cycle

Some of the advantages of having your monitoring and alerting functions automated are

1. Better observability and prompt remediation of any system inconsistencies.
2. More secure environment, as alerts for any suspicious behaviors are checked and an immediate automated alert is sent via an SMS or an email.
3. Better compliance and reduction of potential fines due to an automated logging system.
4. Database of logs for investigation and audit purposes in case of major technical or security issues.

All the above technical fundamentals contain two other key pillars of DevOps development methodology in software: automation and collaboration elements.

Automation in DevOps Development

DevOps Automation is a critical component of the framework because it accomplishes several overarching goals, like improvement of team collaboration and reduction of manual processes at all stages of the software development life cycle.

DevOps Automation is the process of using automation tools to reduce manual repetitive task during design, development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance stage of the SDLC.

Benefits of Automation in DevOps

Automation is a software development best practice that keeps on giving, as its efficiency increases exponentially with the size of the project, emerging technologies, and cloud capabilities.

1. The repetitive tasks are reduced, saving labor costs and decreasing human errors.
2. The collaboration between the developers, testers, and IT operations teams is enabled by powerful collaboration tools with 360-degree observability and A–Z accountability.
3. Scalability of any project with little need to hire more people proportionally to the growth of the project to manage IT systems.

DevOps Top Automation Tools 

There are plenty of open-source automation tools for DevOps projects on the budget as well as paid-for solutions by established third-party vendors. The overall DevOps market is predicted to grow at a CAGR of over 20% from 2022 to 2028, reaching a $30 billion markup from $7 billion in 2021, according to GMI.

The most popular names include:

• Kubernetes
• Docker
• Splunk
• Git
• Jenkins
• Chef
• Terraform
• Puppet 
• Ansible
• Nagios

As every stage in the secure SDLC can now be automated, some of these names will be used simultaneously on one project for different purposes, like infrastructure management, containerization, testing automation, monitoring, etc.

Communication and Collaboration in DevOps Development

Amazon are known to many non-tech laypeople as the retail giant, but in fact, now all its profits are generated by its Cloud Service Provider company AWS [with retail being in the negative]. 

Why do we mention it? Because Amazon knows a thing or two about cloud computing and DevOps.

Ever heard about Two-Pizza Teams Rule?

Amazon invented it. 

Two-pizza teams are essentially agile teams of no more than 6–10 people who sync together often, know each other by their name, and have a full understanding of each other’s scope of work and responsibility. And—last but not least—can be fed by two pizzas.

The 360-degree observability, personal accountability, and seamless collaboration in such teams are a default setting by design.

Embracing DevOps, DevSecOps, and FinOps

All of the above methodologies, starting from Agile team organization to the implementation of automation and Continuous Integration and Deployment principles were revolutionary to the SDLC when they just got coined and still continue to transform the software development realm positively. The benefits of this iterative approach range from cost savings and increased efficiencies to the previously unheard-of scalability of projects.

DevOps methodologies have now become the foundation of other technical frameworks: DevSecOps and FinOps.

DevSecOps focuses on integrating security principles early in the development process and keeping things automated at all stages for testing, monitoring, and updates.

FinOps, AKA Cloud Cost Optimization, zeros in on optimizing any software development project to keep the cloud cost down. The mission is achieved by aligning the actually consumed compute capacity with procured instances while having the freedom to scale at any minute and enjoy high availability where necessary.

DevPro’s team of certified software developers pride themselves on having continuous education at the forefront of our corporate mentality. Our DevOps engineers will gladly help structure, design, develop and deploy your software projects. Book your half hour no-obligations intro call to find out more.

Quick Insights on DevOps Methodology