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The process of software development has always changed, as tasteful and creative programmers are always looking to find a way to improve the situation. The advent of new languages, libraries, and frameworks shows that the computer world is evolving and that software developers must come up with new and innovative solutions to new problems. We want to see what DevOps means?

What is DevOps?

DevOps is the words of Development and Operation, and somehow combines the two concepts. It creates collaboration and interaction between the product development team and the company’s operations team. DevOps is not a specific language or technology, but a combination of philosophy, culture, practices and tools that help our products or services reach our customers faster.

Development refers to the development team, meaning all those involved in product development, debugging, testing, and ultimately product completion. Operation means IT Operation or operations team. The people who generally maintain the company’s hardware, software, and operating environments. DevOps helps organizations speed up the delivery of their products or services to customers, maintain high quality work, and have a strong market presence.

Prior to DevOps, development and operations teams operated in two isolated environments. Separation of the two teams’ work schedules delayed the delivery and completion of the project. At that time, without DevOps, most team members spent time designing, testing, and deploying rather than building the actual project.

Agile relationship with DevOps

Before talking about DevOps, let’s talk a bit about the Agile model and its methods. Agile is a fitting name that carries speed and productivity in a project. Some of the popular Agile methods used in software companies are Scrum, XP, AUP, etc. Although each of these methods has its own separate and independent structure, but in the end they end up growing the collection and improving the quality. In these methods, we are constantly dealing with repetition and getting feedback. Agile helps team members work together to make decisions and move the project forward at high speed and quality.

The main common denominator between DevOps and the Agile method is speed. Both technologies want to shorten the software delivery cycle to the end customer as much as possible. This article is not going to be just about software engineering and its methodologies, so we won’t talk about Agile any more.

How is DevOps different from traditional software development methods?

DevOps has made significant changes to product development and development. It is best to use an example to understand the concept of DevOps, and in this example, examine the difference between traditional methods and DevOps.

Our scenario is that we assume our project is to build an application and we are going to review this application in two weeks. So far, 80% of the project programming has been done and we are buying a server to make the project online and transfer the code to the server. We examine this scenario using both traditional and duplication methods:

In the classic way

the development team activates the new servers, and testing begins on the project. On the other hand, the operations team writes project documentation and examines the required infrastructure. In the DevOps method, after the need for new servers is felt, before the custom team registers, both development and operations units work together on documentation and paperwork to better meet the needs of the project. Then they create new servers.

In the traditional way

programmers working on a project are better able than anyone else to decide on things like configuring servers, their location, the traffic the program is likely to have, and so on. But developers usually do not intervene because of the separation of development and operations. In the DevOps method, developers provide their information to the operations team, and they use these inputs to select the server.

In the traditional method

the operations team does not know the software development process and performs monitoring and review work according to their understanding of the project. DevOps method, the operations team is fully aware of the progress of the project and the steps taken. Because development and operations teams interact, they can design a joint oversight plan based on their IT and business needs. Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools are also used.

Before the program goes online, tests are performed on it to test the performance of the program for the last time. So the program may crash or crash altogether. In this case, the release of the program is delayed. In the DevOps method, a test is run on the program before the final release and it slows down a bit. The development team quickly identifies bottlenecks and fixes major problems. There are no problems with the work schedule and the schedule will be published according to the previous schedule.

Life cycle of DevOps

The DevOps life cycle is 5 general sections:

• Development
• test
• merge
• Expansion
• Monitoring

The first stage, the whole development process is into smaller cycles and the speed of making and delivering the software increases. In the testing phase, the Quality Assurance or QA team uses various tools such as Selenium to troubleshoot new code. The integration step, the new code is merged with the previous code. In the development phase, the situation should be such that whenever new code is added to the program, it does not adversely affect the performance of the product (especially if it has a lot of traffic). In the final stage and the monitoring stage, the team monitors the behavior of the system and fixes any bugs.

Advantages of DevOps

DevOps allows developers to integrate Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. This technique helps your products to reach the market faster. Some of the benefits of using dupes are:

• Predicting product failure or success: DevOps greatly reduces the likelihood of new software failing.
• Reproducibility: Due to the different versions, it is possible to restore the old versions at any time.
• Maintenance: If the new version crashes, it is very easy to restore the previous versions.
• Higher quality: DevOps helps the team maintain quality as well as speed.
• Risk reduction: DevOps addresses security issues in the software delivery cycle.
• Flexibility: Using this technique contributes to the stability, security and flexibility of the software.

When is it necessary to use it and when is it not necessary to use it?

DevOps is in large projects. For example, in building complex business sites or services that are based on the cloud. Also, the use of DevOps is not good where sensitive and important information is exchanging, such as banks, nuclear power plants, energy-related organizations, power, etc.

What is a DevOps engineer?

DevOps Engineer is an IT specialist working with software engineers, programmers, system operators, and other IT professionals. This person must have high hard and technical skills. Having soft skills helps a lot in the career advancement of a DevOps engineer. Because it has to work with and work with different development, operations and testing teams.

Some of the responsibilities, roles, and skills that a DevOps engineer must take on are:

• Ability to fix common problems in different systems
• Design, analysis and evaluation of issues related to systems automation
• Have a lot of experience in programming script languages ​​such as Python, Ruby, Perl and …
• Mastery of CI and CD topics and ability to work with tools such as Maven, Jenkins, etc.
• Master the use of configuration management software such as Puppet, SaltStack, etc.
• Familiarity with soft skills and the ability to quickly learn new topics

Conclusion

DevOps seeks to bring the development team and the operational team closer together. The speed of providing the product or service to the end users will significantly increasing. DevOps is not a technology or a specific type of programming. Rather, it is a set of techniques to increase productivity and increase team work efficiency. Advantages of DevOps over traditional software development methods include flexibility, risk reduction, higher quality, maintenance, repeatability, predicting product failure or success, and more.