What is the role of DevOps?

DevOps assimilates development and operations teams to improve the collaboration process. A DevOps Engineer will work with IT developers to facilitate better coordination among operations, development, and testing functions by automating and streamlining the integration and deployment processes.

DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and information-technology operations (Ops) which aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. Academics and practitioners have not developed a unique definition for the term "DevOps.From an academic perspective, Len Bass, Ingo Weber, and Liming Zhu three computer science researchers from the CSIRO and the Software Engineering Institute suggested defining DevOps as "a set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production, while ensuring high quality. The term DevOps, however, has been used in multiple contexts. Agile and DevOps serve complementary roles: several standard DevOps practices such as automated build and test, continuous integration, and continuous delivery originated in the Agile world, which dates (informally) to the 1990s, and formally to 2001. Agile can be viewed as addressing communication gaps between customers and developers, while DevOps addresses gaps between developers and IT operations infrastructure. Also, DevOps has focused on the deployment of developed software, whether it is developed via Agile or other methodologies.

Archos presents an extension for DevOps practice, starting from software architecture artifacts, instead of source code, for operational deployment. Archos states that architectural models are first-class entities in software development, deployment, and operations.TestOps is to hardware development that DevOps is to software development. The idea is a toolchain that links design and test operations together. In the case of hardware, design means EDA tools and the CAD department, and test means electronic measurement equipment like oscilloscopes and so on.

Continuous delivery and DevOps have common goals and are often used in conjunction, but there are subtle differences. While continuous delivery is focused on automating the processes in software delivery, DevOps also focuses on the organizational change to support great collaboration between the many functions involved.DevOps and continuous delivery share a common background in agile methods and lean thinking: small and frequent changes with focused value to the end customer.[unreliable source?] Lean management and continuous delivery are fundamental to delivering value faster, in a sustainable way. Continuous delivery focuses on making sure the software is always in a releasable state throughout its lifecycle. This makes it cheaper and less risky to deliver the software. Improved collaboration and communication both between and within organizational teams can help achieve faster time to market, with reduced risks.

DevOps is a set of practices that works to automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams, so they can build, test, and release software faster and more reliably. The term DevOps was formed by combining the words “development” and “operations” and signifies a cultural shift that bridges the gap between development and operation teams, which historically functioned in siloes.

It's a firm handshake between development and operations that emphasizes a shift in mindset, better collaboration, and tighter integration. It unites agile, git, continuous delivery, automation, and much more, to help development and operations teams be more efficient, innovate faster, and deliver higher value to businesses and customers.

The DevOps movement started to coalesce some time between 2007 and 2008 when IT operations and software development communities got vocal about what they felt was a fatal level of dysfunction in the industry.

They railed against the traditional software development model, which called for those who write code to be organizationally and functionally apart from those who deploy and support that code.

Developers and IT/Ops professionals had separate (and often competing) objectives, separate department leadership, separate key performance indicators by which they were judged, and often worked on separate floors or even separate buildings. The result was siloed teams concerned only with their own fiefdoms, long hours, botched releases, and unhappy customers. Surely there’s a better way, they said. So the two communities got together and started talking with people like Patrick Dubois, Gene Kim, and John Willis driving the conversation.

What began in online forums and local meet-ups is now a major theme in the software zeitgeist, which is probably what brought you here! You and your team are feeling the pain caused by siloed teams and broken lines of communication within your company.

You’re using agile methodologies for planning and development, but still struggling to get that code out the door without a bunch of drama. You’ve probably heard a few things about DevOps and the seemingly magical effect it can have on teams: Nearly all (99%) of DevOps teams are confident about the success of their code that goes into production, in a survey of 500 DevOps practitioners conducted by Atlassian.

However, DevOps isn’t magic, and transformations don’t happen overnight. The good news is that you don’t have to wait for upper management to roll out a large-scale initiative. By understanding the value of DevOps and making small, incremental changes, your team can embark o

n the DevOps journey right away. Let’s look at each of these benefits in detail.

The long-standing friction between development and operations teams is largely due to a lack of common ground. We believe that sharing responsibility and success goes a long way toward bridging that divide. Developers can win instant goodwill by helping to carry one of the operations’ biggest burdens the pager. DevOps is big on the idea that the same people who build an application should be involved in shipping and running it. This doesn’t mean that you hire developers and simply expect them to be excellent operators as well. It means that developers and operators pair with each other in each phase of the application’s lifecycle.

Teams that embrace DevOps often have a rotating role whereby developers address issues caught by end-users while, at the same, troubleshooting production problems. This person responds to urgent customer-reported issues, creating patches when necessary, and works through the backlog of customer-reported defects. The “developer on support” learns a lot about how the application is used in the wild. And by being highly available to the operations team, the development teams build trust and mutual respect.