Understanding DevOps Corporate Culture and its Benefits

What is DevOps?

DevOps is composed of Development + Operations. Before a project goes online, it is written and developed by the R&D department. It needs to be tested many times before it goes online, and then it is handed over to the maintenance department for maintenance after it goes online. Through empathy, cross-teams and cross-skills can work closely together. Developers can think more about the difficulties that may be encountered at the maintenance level in their operations, and maintenance personnel can think about why they are designed or developed in this way. The purpose of DevOps is to interconnect traditional applications with newer cloud-native applications and infrastructure.

The concept of DevOps is the combination of Development software development, Operation technology maintenance, and Quality Assurance. Under the DevOps model, the original independent engineering team, operation team, and quality assurance team no longer work independently but can achieve closer collaboration, continuous communication, information integration, and transparency. The close cooperation of DevOps runs through all stages of the product life cycle, including program development, integration, testing, release and continuous monitoring of operations, quality assurance, etc. DevOps is not just the responsibility of engineers, but enterprises with software-type products should develop organizational culture.

DevOps Cultural Characteristics Include:

• Co-working: Teams plan and work together and align business-related goals and success metrics.
• Transfer of scope and responsibility: Through team coordination, people can gain ownership of participating in other life cycle stages, not just those for which their roles are primarily responsible.
• Short release cycle: Shorten the development cycle, maintain agile development, respond quickly to market demands, and enhance market competitiveness.
• Continuous learning: DevOps teams have a growth mindset, learn from failures, and continuously optimize the development process.

DevOps Core Concepts - CALMS:

• Culture: DevOps is not a tool but a concept that represents the transformation of IT culture, through empathy and empathy, to make the cooperation between development and operations easier.
• Automation: Automating processes increases efficiency, helps build agile teams, and produces high-quality products.
• Lean: DevOps hopes to build agile development teams, so the lean production process is important, including the principles of reducing waste, delivering as soon as possible, and delaying decision-making. Delaying decision-making means that leaders can wait until they receive complete information decide.
• Measurement: Use data to judge whether the decision is correct. If the number is abnormal, you can change the strategy at any time, so that the team can maintain agility.
• Sharing: By sharing information between teams, the efficiency of problem-solving can be improved.

DevOps Lifecycle:

• Plan: During the planning phase, the DevOps team defines the programs and system features currently under development. Track progress by category to achieve agile development. Such as the establishment of agency projects, instruments, use of workflow, development progress, etc.
• Develop: DevOps teams seek rapid innovation to maintain quality. Many repetitive or general steps in the development process can be automated to improve efficiency, and automated testing can shorten the development cycle.
• Deliver: The delivery process refers to the process of deploying an application to a production environment, including the infrastructure setup and composition of the environment. Use automation gateways to automate the process of mobile applications, making them easy to adjust, repeat, and control, practicing the spirit of DevOps with consistent and reliable delivery.
• Operate: The operation phase includes maintaining and monitoring the application in a production environment, and troubleshooting in real-time. DevOps teams use real-time telemetry and alert release mechanisms to quickly identify and resolve issues to ensure high application availability.

What was the Motivation for Introducing DevOps?

The integration of different departments and tools will face many problems when the company's internal team cooperates. Using the automation and flexible processes of DevOps can not only solve the integration process but also respond to the rapid changes in market demand to ensure that tools and practical operations will not appear too much.

What are the Advantages of DevOps?

• Deliver products faster: Continuous integration and continuous delivery are both practical applications of DevOps model automation software. Through their use, the frequency of version release and the speed of updates can be effectively improved. At the same time, the concept of DevOps emphasizes frequent and small release changes to reduce the possibility of each release risks encountered.
• Stronger market competitiveness: When organizations continue to use DevOps continuous integration, automated processes for continuous delivery, and frequent, small release changes, it can speed up bug fixes and product releases. In this way, the shortened issuance cycle can not only respond to the needs of the market and customers more quickly but also establish a competitive advantage in the market.
• Higher scalability: Automation is one of the goals of DevOps model development and maintenance. Through automation and consistency, the risk of system changes can be reduced, and the basic code can be reused repeatedly and efficiently, improving product scalability and extension.
• Higher system stability and reliability: Continuous integration and continuous delivery capabilities test whether each change is stable and practical, and ensure that the quality of applications and infrastructure can be maintained at a certain level. In addition, the practice of monitoring and recording can also help to observe the real-time performance of the system.
• Stronger security: Frequent and small-scale software modifications can reduce the risk of human error and improve security. By automating compliance policies and fine-tuning controls, you can ensure system security and compliance.
• Better collaboration efficiency: One of the tenets of DevOps is to build an efficient team, make development, operations, and quality assurance teams work closely together, and combine their work processes to reduce communication gaps and inefficiencies between teams, and can effectively save development teams. The time of the handover period with the operations team. This approach enables faster product development and improvement than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management programs.

DevOps Practical Application:

• Continuous development: This practice may involve the mechanism of version control and is closely related to the planning and coding phases of the DevOps and product life cycle.
• Continuous integration: It is mainly used to track how much code is available for operation and to quickly identify and solve code problems to improve software quality. In this practice, after developers perform automated builds and tests, they need to regularly integrate code into a central repository to find problems in the shortest time possible.
• Continuous delivery: Continuous Delivery is an extension of the continuous integration practice that automatically builds, tests, and changes code until release and production. If you want to promote it to the formal working environment, it is also decided at this stage.
• Continuous monitoring and logging: To continuously monitor the running code, and all the underlying architectures that support this code, to observe how its performance affects end users. The data records obtained through continuous monitoring can be used as a basis for investigating the possible causes of errors or problems.
• Infrastructure as code: Code is the infrastructure for using code and deploying and developing software, which can be used in various development and maintenance phases. Developers add infrastructure code to development tools, allowing operations teams to monitor the organization of the environment and track changes. Infrastructure can be deployed in a standardized pattern or replicated iteratively.
• Security in DevOps: DevOps involves more than just development and operations teams. To get the most out of DevOps, organizations must consider how security impacts the application lifecycle. That means you must consider core security measures from the planning stage, and you must automate certain security functions to prevent DevOps Workflow slows down. Choosing the right tools to integrate security mechanisms can help you achieve the security goals of DevOps.

An effective DevOps security mechanism requires more than new tools and must be based on a DevOps cultural innovation to integrate the work of the security team as soon as possible. While DevOps can speed things up by closing the gap between development and operations, it can fail due to a poorly planned security program. In the past, security measures were in the final stages of development and dedicated to a set of independent teams. In today's collaborative DevOps architecture, security mechanisms are everyone's responsibility and should be integrated from the start.