What Is DevOps: A Practical Guide DevOps

Today, it’s everything “Ops”. You may have heard and seen the term “Ops” many times. Most likely, every vendor has an “Ops” product for you already.

Can you live without it? Yes. Should you? My answer is no.

Let’s talk about it.

In my previous article, I mentioned 4xOps:

• DevOps
• SecOps
• DataOps
• FinOps

Let’s get into a bit more detail on the most mature one: DevOps.

You’ve heard this term by now hundreds, if not thousands of times. It is being used in every possible form by every vendor out there.

Fun fact: did you know that the term DevOps was coined for a dedicated talk about it, only because there was no other name? Yet it has stuck for over 10 years now.

DevOps. The holy grail of IT. But is it only an IT tool?

What is DevOps?

Have you started implementing it? What does it mean to put DevOps in place? What does it mean for your organization?

Have you asked yourself these questions?

The evidence is out there. DevOps as a practice (because it is a practice, not a tool) helps organizations to be more efficient. You can see it from the State of DevOps report or this article and report from Google.

The benefits of DevOps

Those are the reports, but here is my observation based on the projects we run with customers.

At the majority of organizations, when people say DevOps, what they refer to is automation. And sure, DevOps is IT-driven and focused on deployment automation. The idea isn’t wrong, but it’s just a piece of the truth.

So, let’s dissect it.

Where to begin with DevOps?

First, we need to have a repository of things we want to deploy. This would mostly be Azure DevOps or GitHub in the Microsoft products world. That’s a pre-requisite. Team(s) have to have a single place to work together.

When we have it, we can start thinking about the next step, Continuous Integration.

What is Continuous Integration (CI)?

It is a process of putting pieces from the repository together into release.

Anyone who went through the release of IT projects into production will understand the benefit. Nothing will get missed from the notes. No files forgotten to be included.

It is automated. Repeatable.

It’s a process.

Then, it’s time for the next stage.

What is Continuous Delivery (CD)?

Imagine this: what if your application could be deployed not just over weekends? What if you could push it to production at any time? And if something goes wrong, go back to the previous version just like that?

This is Continuous Delivery. Changing the pain of deployment into a repeatable, observable, and measurable process.

Here is where most organizations stop. CI/CD. Hurray! We have DevOps!

Unfortunately, no, you do not.

The next step in completing your DevOps implementation

So far you have addressed only the technical side of your pains, and not all of them. To have full control, you need to make your applications:

• observable: to be able to say if they work and do what they should do
• measurable: to be able to answer the question about their health and business process using numbers.

Now it is time to start adopting DevOps as a process.

First: it is a communication tool. All work put into making your deployment process smooth will not do much if people will not see the benefit of it. And I mean people outside of IT.

How can they see it? Here it comes… the backlog!

Don’t be scared. I will not preach the agile way of working to you.