Devops and Automation

Software development model has been changing rapidly since 2006. First V development model got changed to Agile methodology, but everyone is moving towards Devops and DevSecOps.

Let’s First discuss about the need of moving from Agile to Devops. As we know, software is getting in every field now. Any luxury car is having 1200 microchips and every chip is having sophisticated device drivers to run various features. Software needs is expected to grow exponential in time decade. Most of the product requirements are coming at fast pace and market wants delivery of these products or feature request as faster pace. If software community does not respond with faster delivery, market goes to some other product or move on to different technology.

20 years ago, any software team will get 3-6 months to complete their product and there was lot of focus on requirement gathering, Architecture, Design and Coding on big projects but things started changing once customers became time conscious, they wanted delivery faster. Agile concept came to rescue where it proposed to divide big project in to smaller chunks and first deliver proof of concept of the end product and once customer understands the end product better, keep developing other components to finish the product in total.

Over the period, Customer wanted this first deliverable with inbuilt quality and wanted each additional component to keep maintaining the highest quality standards even though time provided for such complex projects were always short due to time to market pressure. This required lots of changes in development process where each update needs to be checked thoroughly before adding any components to main product and even single line of code needs to scrutinize before releasing to operation team to deploy it.

Development teams always wanted to add new features and continuously work on fixing defects and improving efficiency of the product and kept on releasing new releases but operation teams always wanted stability and they were reluctant to change production software because every new release came with instability which requires lots of effort from operation team to stabilize the production setup and by the time development team was ready with another software release.

One of the major challenges was to have exact same setup both the side of the process. Development teams were doing everything properly and software will work fine in development setup, but it will start failing in production setup. There were differences between development setup and production setup which caused major problems in whole process.

DevOps was developed to solve above mentioned problems. Devops encompasses various aspects which includes:

•    Automation: Automation is essential for Devops for quick feedback
•    Measurement: DevOps find a specific path to measurement, quality and shared the vision
•    Sharing: Creates a culture where people share ideas, processes, and tools. 

In other words, Devops is set of practices which combines Development team and Operation teams. Devops best practices includes continuous development and continuous deployment. 

In Devops, Automation is key and during continuous development, pipeline is defined which is responsible to conduct various steps for checking quality of code changes and building the executable which can be deployed in production environment.

Devops pipelines requires various tools which can be called in CI-CD pipelines automatically and if new code changes has created some defect, it can reject those code changes even before code check-in and if code changes are fine, it allows to build and later deploy these code changes to production servers.

Most of the software development teams uses Static Code analyzers to detect coding defect, Dynamic Code analyzers to find runtime errors and GUI testing solutions to find any functionality related problems. It is especially important that software companies use right set of tools in their pipelines and as Devops strategy, use multiple static code analysis solutions, Dynamic code analysis and various levels of testing before releasing software for deployment. Most of the DevOps products are configurable by command line which can be called by any simple script. DevOps Best practices are evolving and software companies should always look for upcoming Devops methods to update their CI-CD pipelines. 

Most of the companies are capable to implement DevOps themselves by help of hiring Devops experts but if time is short, companies are hiring DevOps coachs or DevOps service providers who come up with Devops Strategy and implement DevOps Best practices.

Whatever is the case, Every software process will move towards DevOps Automation and Meteonic has been helping hundreds of customers in India as well as South Asia to successfully implement DevOps automation by providing right set of solution to implement various stages in CI-CD pipelines.