Short in DevOps expertise?

DevOps (Development and Operations) is a methodology that assumes the combination of two areas that usually function separately: development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams. The purpose of this solution is to achieve established goals better and faster.

The key principles of DevOps include automation, iteration, continuous testing and improvement, and enhanced collaboration.

• Automation: workflow, testing of new code, and infrastructure delivery automation to maximize productivity.
• Iteration: writing small portions of code as part of a sprint to increase the speed, stability, and frequency of deployments.
• Continuous testing and improvement: a continuous search for product and process improvement as well as responding to feedback to optimize the efficiency, costs, and deployment time.
• Collaboration: close interaction of teams, communication improvement, combining together such IT areas as development and QA.

According to a survey by RedGate Software from 2021, 74% of enterprises throughout the world have already adopted DevOps in some form, an increase of almost 100% in 5 five years. This number includes all the most-known tech companies, such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix, that use DevOps to increase efficiency and improve the delivery time of their software development processes.

With DevOps, you can bring several benefits to your organization, including:

• technical benefits, such as more frequent software deploys, faster resolution of problems, less complexity to manage
• cultural benefits, such as a more productive team and higher employee engagement
• and business benefits, such as faster delivery of features, improved communication and collaboration between your Development and Operation teams, and a more stable operating environment

The top obstacles to an effective DevOps effort include a lack of appropriate skills in the team, disruption to existing workflows/business, and a lack of alignment between development and operations teams, according to a survey by RedGate Software from 2021.

There are three areas that can be heavily automated with DevOps. They include:

• Deployment automation – Continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment translate into instant deployment to test or production environments. You can introduce full test automation and continuous testing in both test and production environments
• Monitoring and security – you can introduce full automation of monitoring to increase the security of your software. This is done by developing simple tools reflecting the state of a system at a given moment and security test automation
• Infrastructure automation – You can also automate the management and deployment of testing and production environments through scripts

At Multishoring we maximize the productivity of our DevOps teams using the following techniques:

• By reducing the number of people in a team: we build small self-organizing teams to improve communication, provide decision-making autonomy, and increase control over work
• By continuously perfecting the product and processes: we practice Continuous Improvement rules to boost productivity and adapt to new business circumstances
• By investing in appropriate collaboration tools: we utilize solutions that allow current progress tracking, version and release control as well as supporting team communication
• By increasing the effectiveness of meetings: we use Scrum meetings to maximize the focus on the goal and decrease the time needed for meetings and their costs

DevOps tools play a crucial role in supporting DevOps implementation. Rapid buildup of software and progressive planning of sprints require more adaptive technologies. The framework of Continuous Development/Continuous Integration (CD/CI) means that software is managed by versions and the entire software development life cycle is fully automated from coding into compiling then testing and deployment onto production.

There are many DevOps tools available in the market that can support this process. Below there are just a few examples of such tools. It is also important to mention that tools are only relevant when they are used at the last stage i.e after the organization has already adopted the philosophy of DevOps and there is a commitment to executing its best practices.

• Release DevOps Tools: Jenkins, Travis, TeamCity
• Configuration Management Tools: Puppet, Saltstack
• Orchestration Tools: Zookeeper, Noah
• Monitoring Tools: CloudWatch, Opsgenie, Splunk
• Containerization Tools: Amazon ECS, Azure Kubernetes Services, Docker, Kubernetes
• Cloud Platforms: AWS, Azure Cloud, Google Cloud, OpenStack
• Coding Tools: Jira, Git, Eclipse
• Testing Tools: Junit, Zephyr

No, Agile and DevOps are not the same. The thing they have in common is that Agile and DevOps both aim towards delivering quality software in a timely manner. The key difference between Agile versus DevOps is that Agile is a philosophy about how to develop and deliver software, while DevOps is focused on how to continuously deploy code with the use of modern tools and automated processes.

Combining DevOps and Agile for software development is a very popular method for increased productivity and delivery of high-quality software products. The approach can also optimize the incremental development of the software and its maintenance.

Such a combined approach to software development is practiced at Multishoring. Our Agile and DevOps-driven software development process includes:

• Agile software development — ensures a smoother and faster product development life cycle
• Automated testing — enables constant quality verification at each stage of the development process through the automated unit and functional testing, load testing, and vulnerability testing. The software testing is done by our in-house testing team cooperating with the development team on a daily basis
• Continuous integration — automates the build and testing of code every time a team member commits changes to version control. In this way, you can detect problems early and improve code quality
• Infrastructure automation — enables the management of infrastructure (networks, virtual machines, load balancers, and connection topology) in a descriptive model, using the same versioning as our DevOps teams use for source code
• Continuous delivery — with continuous delivery, you aim to have the full software delivery life cycle automated up until the final stage before production, where there is a manual trigger to release the new features
• Continuous deployment — with continuous deployment, any updated working version of the application is automatically pushed to production