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What is DevOps?

DevOps is a combination of development and operation. Development refers to software development, and operation mainly refers to technical operation & maintenance. It can be regarded as the intersection of software development, technical operation and maintenance, and quality assurance.

DevOps practices promote smoother, continuous communication, collaboration, integration, visibility, and transparency between application development teams and their IT operations partners. The DevOps lifecycle covers many phases: from initial software planning, through the code, build, test, and release phases, to deployment, operations, and continuous monitoring. They maintain a cycle of continuous improvement, development, testing, and deployment.

DevOps goals can be divided into four categories: Culture, Automation, Measure, and Share (CAMS). These tools make development and operations workflows more streamlined and collaborative, automating time-consuming, manual, or static work that previously involved integration, development, testing, deployment, or monitoring.

Why is DevOps important?

In addition to striving to break down communication and collaboration barriers between development and IT operations teams, a core value of DevOps is customer satisfaction and faster time to value. DevOps is designed to drive enterprise innovation and continuous process improvement.

DevOps practices encourage faster, better, and more secure delivery of business value to an organization's end customers. This value may come in the form of more frequent product releases, features, or updates. This may involve the speed at which customers can receive product releases or new features, all of which must be of an appropriate level of quality and security. Alternatively, it might focus on the speed at which issues or bugs are identified, and then resolved and republished. Underlying infrastructure also supports DevOps to provide smooth performance, availability, and software reliability. DevOps facilitates development and testing of software before it is released for production.

DevOps development and maintenance toolchain:

Followers of DevOps practices typically use some easy-to-use DevOps tools in their DevOps toolchains. The goal of these tools is to further simplify, shorten and automate all stages of the software delivery workflow. Promotes core DevOps principles such as automation, collaboration, and integration between development and operations teams.

• Planning: This phase helps define business value and requirements, and assists in tracking known issues and performing project management.
• Code: This phase involves software design and the creation of software code.
•  Build: During this phase software builds and versions and automated tools will be managed. It will be used to assist in compiling and packaging the code for future release to the production environment. The source code repository or package repository used also encapsulates the infrastructure required for product release.
• Testing: This phase includes continuous testing to ensure optimal code quality.
• Deployment: This phase can include tools to help manage, coordinate, schedule, and automate the release of the product to the production environment.
• Action: This phase manages the software during production.
• Oversight: This phase includes identifying and collecting information about specific software version issues in production.

DevOps development and maintenance practices:

• Continuous Development: This practice covers the planning and coding phases of the DevOps lifecycle.
• Continuous testing: This practice includes pre-scheduled continuous automated code testing while the application's code is being written or updated. These types of tests can speed up the delivery of code to production.
• Continuous Integration (CI): This practice combines configuration management (CM) tools and other testing and development tools to track how much of the code being developed is ready for production. This involves providing quick feedback between testing and development to quickly identify and resolve code issues.
•   Continuous Delivery: This practice automatically delivers code changes to a pre-production or staging environment after testing. Employees can then decide whether or not to roll out such code changes to the production environment.
• Continuous Deployment (CD): Similar to Continuous Delivery, this practice automates the release of new or changed code to the production environment. Companies that perform continuous deployment can release code or feature changes several times a day.
• Continuous Monitoring: This practice involves continuous monitoring of the code in operation and the underlying infrastructure supporting that code. The feedback loop that reports bugs or issues then goes back to development.
• Infrastructure as Code: This practice can be used in various DevOps phases of DevOps to automate the provisioning of infrastructure resources required for software releases. Developers can add infrastructure code from their existing development tools. This practice also allows operations teams to monitor the environmental configuration, track changes, and simplify configuration recovery.

• Deliver products faster and better
• Solve problems faster and reduce complexity
• Higher scalability and availability
• More stable working environment
• Better resource utilization
• Better automation
• Get a clearer grasp of system outcomes
• Higher level of innovation

DevOps implementation process and method:

1. Agile Software Development
   A software development method that emphasizes the close collaboration of business, design, and development teams. It organizes flexible cross-functional teams through effective communication, frequent delivery of new software versions, and writing code that can respond well to changes in demand. Waterfall software development is a top-down development program like a waterfall, from product requirement design to maintenance and update. Due to the strict and fixed division of each stage, the release of the version takes a long time and it is difficult to make changes in the process, and the development risk is high. The agile development process is faster and more flexible in terms of adjustment and modification.
2. Automation
   Automation is a very important part of the DevOps concept, and focuses on development process automation and infrastructure automation.
   • Development Process Automation - Development process automation is designed to speed up software delivery, including deployment, monitoring, and testing of server management processes. Automated deployment can reduce the possibility of errors in manual operations and improve software security.
   • Infrastructure Automation - The most common practice is infrastructure as code, where code is used to build and manage infrastructure. Engineers can treat infrastructure like application code, making processes such as deployments and updates more efficient, while improving security.
3. Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
   Since most companies develop a software product in collaboration with multiple software engineers, it is necessary to continuously integrate new code changes from each developer into a central database. Continuous delivery is based on continuous integration. After automatic construction and automatic testing, the code that has passed the standardized test program is ready to be deployed to the production environment. Consistent and fast delivery increases the speed of software updates and fixes.
4. Microservice
   Microservice is a design method of software development architecture that disassembles complex large-scale systems, and creates multiple small and independent projects, by communicating through well-defined APIs. Usually, the establishment of microservices is based on service functions.
5. Monitoring and Analysis
   Teams that implement DevOps will continue to monitor, record, and analyze user reactions and feedback to software products. They establish trackable and meaningful alert indicators to help them understand the impact of changes on user experience and make improvements to these products. As infrastructure and applications are updated more and more frequently, setting up effective warning indicators and more proactive monitoring systems will improve the reliability of software delivery and the efficiency of problem response.

Communication and cooperation is the essential core of team organizations. By establishing a corporate culture of providing transparent information and close cooperation, the development, operation, and client teams can establish common goals and effective communication and cooperation methods. Through cooperation, automation, and monitoring, they can increase efficiency, improve the quality of software services, and speed up new releases and updates.