The app’s source code is where business ideas find their embodiment. However, for the end users to try the features, the code must go a long way from the idea to landing on the server. One of the possible solutions that allow development companies to fill the gap between writing code and putting it into production is DevOps. Today, we’ll speak about what DevOps is, what critical practices it relies on, and what trends will rise in the future.

What DevOps is All About?

As the name suggests, DevOps services help bring together two groups of specialists working on the same project. Here, we speak of the web app development team and IT operations team. The application development team constantly introduces codebase changes that must be tested and pushed into production. It includes, for example, new features and bug fixes. On the other hand, the IT operations team primarily focuses on ensuring that the system is always stable and available. So, DevOps’ primary role is to “reconcile” those who constantly push changes, increasing the risks of breaking something, with those whose duty is to minimize such risks.

So, DevOps here takes care of two vital characteristics. The first is velocity. In terms of software development, velocity means how fast products or apps can be piped through the release pipeline. The second one is quality. It’s not enough to deliver the working app fast. Also, you must ensure that profound testing guarantees the quality of the product you deliver. Therefore, one must somehow balance quality and velocity.

Suppose you imagine the app development and delivery process as a chain of activities. In that case, we have Ideas (also known as the Planning or Ideation phase) at the very beginning of it. It represents the app features that should be delivered to add value to the business and its clients. The next step is Coding or Development. That’s where programmers implement actual app features. Then we have the Build or Integration phase, where the code is packaged into executables and runtimes that will go to the next stage, where we Deploy them on some runtime environment, such as the cloud, for example. The Manage or Operations phase is about what happens to a web app after deployment. The last one in this line is Learning or Continuous Feedback, which is all about app improvement. We don’t only need to define whether we move quickly enough through this chain but also check if the quality is improving or not.

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So, if we need to identify use cases for increasing velocity and quality during the app development and testing, we could highlight the following three primary examples:

1. Optimizing core systems. Here, we mean what’s deep within the enterprise. They’re typically monolithic and legacy systems. Such apps are usually difficult to modernize or refactor. In these cases, the DevOps routine is generally about retrofitting automation on-site to optimize what you have;
2. Addressing the culture to help bring development and operations together;
3. Moving towards continuous improvements. The need for continuous delivery appears as SaaS solutions, Kubernetes, and Docker become more mature and widespread. Therefore, everything, from ideation at the beginning and all the way through, becomes a part of an improvement loop and rounds back to the beginning. This way, we can learn what we can do better when developing and testing our app and then feed this info back into the pipeline. By implementing practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), teams can rapidly integrate code changes, automate testing, and deploy updates frequently.

DevOps Key Concepts And Useful Tools

As all steps involved in DevOps processes run in a loop to guarantee the balance between app quality and implementation speed, we often refer to some of the best practices as “continuous something.” In this chapter, we’ll share how various DevOps practices help improve the software development lifecycle and what tools engineers usually use.

Continue reading: https://xbsoftware.com/blog/devops-trends/