DevOps enables organizations to capitalize on the flexibility of cloud resources in real-time, which is a huge game changer. Just as the adoption of Agile methodology can make a development team more responsive, DevOps revolutionizes implementation of IT objectives from end to end, from a waterfall-style process gating company productivity to a dynamic process that makes better-quality software fast and easy.
Organizations have been taking advantage of increasingly flexible resources and moving away from conveyor belt-style project delivery with hardware and software resource planning, ordering and integration. DevOps provides a way to address the question, “If we can provision resources quickly and easily, how can we complete entire projects with similar responsiveness?”
As DevOps lowers the wall between development and operations, staying sane and accountable doesn’t have to bog down processes. Structured communication still takes place, but in an iterative, incremental fashion, much like polishing a jewel.
Instead of lofty goals set in the somewhat-distant future, practical solutions can be created, deployed and adjusted. The process gets applications in the hands of end users far sooner, smooths any rough edges using actual user feedback, and helps organizations not only become more responsive to changing needs but make much more efficient use of valuable software development and operations resources.
Why Dev and Ops Teams Need to Collaborate
It can be hard for an organization’s culture to adapt to this level of change. But both development and operations teams have some pain points that help motivate them to work together more dynamically.
The development (Dev) side of the house wants to deliver more timely solutions, ensure greater acceptance of new applications and use its resources more efficiently. Operations (Ops) has challenges with hardware resource planning; they have maintenance and cost-reduction projects that are delayed. Ops also has insights into new features, efficiencies and integrations, but with no way to implement them.
These and other pain points arise when traditional, waterfall-style processes constrain communication and implementation. Creating a new flow between the two teams helps to reduce these pain points.
Rather than being tied to a specific technology, DevOps is a methodology aimed at making software development efficient. Containerization narrows the gap between development and IT Ops to a minimum. Containers are a great tool for enabling DevOps workflows and simplifying the development and delivery pipelines. Containers hold the code and dependencies required to run an application and reside in isolation. This enables teams to develop, test and deploy apps inside these closed environments. And this doesn’t affect different parts of the delivery, making the lives of testers and developers a lot easier.
Enabling CI/CD
DevOps has created a way to automate processes to build, test and code faster and more reliably. Continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) isn’t a novel concept, but tools like Jenkins have done much to define what a CI/CD pipeline should look like. While DevOps represents a cultural change in the organization, CI/CD is the core engine that drives the success of DevOps.
With CI, teams must implement smaller changes more often, but they check the code with the version control repositories. Therefore, there is a lot more consistency in the building, packing and testing of apps, leading to better collaboration and software quality. CD begins where CI ends. Since teams work on several environments (prod, dev, test, etc.), the role of CD is to automate code deployment to these environments and execute service calls to databases and servers.
The CI/CD concept isn’t entirely new, but it’s only now that we have the right tools to fully reap the benefits of CI/CD. Containers make it extremely easy to implement a CI/CD pipeline and enable a much more collaborative culture. Containers are very lightweight and can scale endlessly, run on any environment and are very flexible. It doesn’t get easier than this.
Now, you can move code across containers–or container clusters, as is the case with Kubernetes–instead of moving code among various virtual machines (VMs) in different environments. VMs are static and leverage a monolithic application architecture, whereas containers use a distributed microservices model. This opens doors to new benefits when it comes to elasticity, high availability and resource use.
As part of a DevOps team-oriented approach, team members can reach out to their peers and share innovation, feeding their knowledge and experiences into the evolving process. Development teams can put the new resources to use, taking advantages of technologies such as containers and Kubernetes to architect solutions. Working together, this cooperation lets Ops run with the solution, scale it, distribute and upgrade efficiently without delay.
Putting it All Together
DevOps has helped organizations reimagine their entire development lifecycle. And while DevOps brings cultural change, CI/CD is the core engine that makes DevOps successful. New tools like containers now make it easier for organizations to make the most of CI/CD. However, data storage must be taken into consideration, because it undergirds a dynamic DevOps environment. It also provides failover, disaster recovery and other essential availability and reliability features. Software-defined storage offers the flexibility that a dynamic DevOps environment needs. It’s a crucial element in the success of your DevOps program.
