Even with DevOps increasingly present among companies’ technology sectors, confusion over what exactly this term means is still common. For some DevOps it is a working methodology, a culture, a tool or the sum of all of that.
However, the truth is that, more important than defining exactly what DevOps means, is to be aware that to achieve success from it is challenging, since it requires a whole journey of changing thoughts. Therefore, in this article, we will answer some fundamental questions on the subject. Including:
What is DevOps;
How is DevOps implemented;
The benefits of DevOps for your company;
What are the main DevOps tools;
How microservices support DevOps.
In the world of technology everyone should be used to new terms and tools. A great example of this is that, in the past, we did not hear about the cloud and other terms that are present in the daily lives of any professional in the area.
The change in the IT sector has been and will continue to be constant. And it is exactly in this scenario that DevOps appears. That is, within an environment, in which new technologies are used to achieve more productivity and better results, this new term is no exception.
DevOps, therefore, replaces traditional methods, through a culture of automation and team integration, in order to increase a company’s production capacity.
In order to integrate the development and operation teams, as well as to promote mutual and constant learning between them, companies must implement a new mentality among business environments.
DevOps, in this sense, does this by replacing procedures that were manual, in order to provide more agility and precision in updating software, through automation.
In practice, for this new methodology to be implemented, the company must define shared goals among all employees. In addition, you also need to select performance tools, which will influence the entire work process.
Once this is done, all the teams will be aligned and will visualize the production and preparation processes well. Consequently, the performance of its products becomes the main characteristic to be achieved.
Finally, for the best user experience, continuous testing procedures are also essential in DevOps. After all, just testing is the ideal result.
The DevOps culture has tools that help to achieve the expected performance. All employees, therefore, must know their roles to make the work flow more fluid.
It is worth highlighting some solutions in the process of this new methodology, which are: Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, IaC, Grafana. Each one helps to perform a DevOps stage, see, respectively, some of them.
Continuous integration tool (Jenkins);
Packaging an entire application or environment into a container (Docker);
Orchestration of containers (Kubernetes);
IaC (Infra as Code) Ansible and Terraforma are some of the solutions for provisioning and managing infrastructure by code
Dashboard creation for monitoring metrics and their environment (Grafana).
The organization and architecture of microservices aims to leave traditional software programming behind. That is, dispense with monolithic writing, which requires a complete analysis of the code in cases of failure.
Microservices divide complex tasks into smaller processes that work independently of one another. In that sense, they allow for quick changes and short release times, along with high scalability and autonomous teams.
This organization, therefore, goes against the strategies implemented by DevOps. After all, as it is a methodology that seeks efficiency in its processes, any tool that contributes to the maintenance and testing of the product is welcome.
Separately, both practices offer more flexibility for a company. Together, they have a huge impact on every part of operations – from the IT landscape to business decisions.
In short, the continuous deployment promoted by microservices can result in hundreds or thousands of launches per day. Here are some more qualities they can bring to DevOps:
Scalability;
Resilience;
Speed;
Higher levels of automation;
Flexibility;