The origin of DevOps is dated back between 2007 and 2008 while it has garnered wide popularity over the past years. Not only does it facilitate collaboration between the IT operations and development teams, but offers a lot of advantages such as higher productivity, faster product delivery, high quality product development, improved organizational culture, and enhanced automation, to name a few.
No wonder that businesses and organizations from diverse sectors are adopting DevOps at an increasing rate to reach their development and business goals. To give you a glimpse, in a recent survey, nearly 80% of the respondents claimed that DevOps has been highly beneficial for their organization. And that’s not it, according to a recent market report, the global DevOps market is expected to reach $37.227 billion by 2030 from its benchmark of 7.398 billion in 2021 while growing at a CAGR of 20% during the forecast period of 2022 to 2030.
Wondering what makes DevOps so highly sought-after around the globe? Read on to know more.
What Is DevOps?
DevOps is defined as a set of rules, practices, and tools that facilitate collaboration between the IT operations and development teams. Being an amalgamation of IT, development, and cultural philosophies, DevOps improves the operations and development activities of an organization resulting in high quality fast product delivery.
Not only does it reduce the limitations in the conventional siloed development and IT teams, but helps you develop a market-driven competitive product. The key stages of DevOps are as shown below -
1. Continuous Development
This is the first stage of DevOps where one needs to craft a complete plan and code the software. Here you need to plan the entire process regarding product development and management. The key product features to be implemented, development approach, tech stacks needed, process flow, resources needed - all are planned in this stage to ensure smooth and fast product development and delivery.
One of the unique factors about the planning stage in DevOps is that different teams participate in the planning stage including the developers, testers, project managers, IT teams, and other stakeholders to bring out the best in your product.
2. Continuous Integration
This is often considered as the main phase of DevOps where the developers need to make changes to the source code frequently to implement the received inputs and align with the software development requirements.
Before you build codes and commit them, you need to take into account any possible inputs and changes that let you point out issues at the early stages and improve the software development process through continuous integration. As the new codes for new functionalities or functionalities enhancement are integrated continuously, this phase is called continuous integration.
3. Continuous Testing
Once the continuous integration is over, the testing process is executed continuously to detect any possible bugs, errors, or issues in your software. Testing is pivotal in eliminating errors and any possible loopholes in a software and DevOps testing is even a more advanced version as it refers to an automated process to ensure your product quality. Also, this stage of DevOps lets you have an in-depth codebase report that can be utilized by the stakeholders to ensure optimum product quality.
4. Continuous Monitoring
Continuous monitoring is a crucial stage in DevOps where your developer team needs to closely monitor the key areas of the software functionalities, features, and solutions. Also, in this stage, the important information and operational factors of the DevOps process flow is recorded to address any existing problem statement.
Generally, this monitoring process/solution is integrated within the software’s operational functionalities. Most of the system issues such as non-availability of servers, memory restrictions, and others are addressed in this phase.
5. Continuous Feedback
In this stage, the software development gets improved by assessing the operability of a software and its key functionalities. The feedback process is implemented between the operations and development process of the software and the feedback is implemented to develop the best possible version of the software.
6. Continuous Deployment
Continuous deployment refers to an iterative software development approach where a product is developed through an iterative deployment process that facilitates batch-wise continuous software development and update.
Not only does it widen the scope for easy and fast continuous improvement, but also offers a lot of other benefits such as better product quality, reduced resource wastage, improved customer satisfaction, and better operability, to name a few.
7. Continuous Operations
The continuous operations stage is significant in DevOps as it helps improve and streamline the operational activities of the development, testing, IT, and other teams. Starting from data collection, management to improving production capacity - this stage helps you execute multiple operational activities.
See More: How Do Agile and DevOps Interrelate?
Benefits of DevOps
DevOps is not just a mere process but a highly effective approach to improve your product development and aid in your business growth. Below are some of the top benefits of DevOps that make it highly adopted around the globe.
1. High Quality Product Development
One of the key benefits of DevOps is it helps you develop a high quality product without needing you to invest heavily. As it takes a continuous integration and monitoring approach during product development, you can be assured that all the required inputs or feedback are taken care of during the DevOps process and the final product is well-maintained to keep up with the current market requirements.
2. Better Collaboration and Culture
DevOps focuses on collaboration among different teams in an organization such as IT, operations, development, testing, and others. This improves the communication, collaboration and overall transparency of a business. This not only helps in product development but also improves the overall collaboration processes of an organization resulting in better organizational culture.
3. Fast and Streamlined Process Flows
One of the unique benefits of DevOps is, it takes into account the inputs and perspectives of different teams for various processes such as development, testing, maintenance, and others. This improves the overall processes and their respective outputs. For instance, it helps speed up the development and release of products without compromising the product quality.
Also, it helps improve product maintenance, upgrading, scaling and other processes. So, if streamlining and speeding up your business processes is one of your business goals, then you must opt for DevOps.
4. Improved Management
DevOps helps an organization organize and manage works by prioritizing and dividing them among the relevant teams. Not only does it help the teams execute faster but also reduces the MTR (Mean Time to Recovery), minimizes the complexities in various processes and simplifies the management process.
See More: Mobile App Development - Step by Step Guide for 2022
Challenges of DevOps
Like every other methodology, DevOps also comes with its challenges and restraining factors that you must overcome to unleash its potential fully. Below are some of the top challenges of DevOps -
1. Migration to Microservices
One of the key challenges of DevOps is migrating to microservices. While such migrations are required to adopt and utilize the relevant innovations, the adoption of DevOps comes with a lot of requirements for this purpose.
A successful migration from legacy systems to microservices requires proper foundation and configuration. So, unless you have the proper infrastructure and expertise it can be challenging in DevOps to migrate to microservices.
2. New Tools Integration
While DevOps may require several automation and code repository tools for various processes, new tools integration can be quite challenging in DevOps as you need to look after the security aspects, need to have the proper infrastructure, and train the relevant teams to keep the productivity intact.
3. Multiple Environments Management
Multiple environments management can be a major challenge in DevOps as the existence of multiple environments increases the complexity related to staging, testing, production, and other phases. Also, you need to define and determine the scope of each stage beforehand to simplify the management process.
What Is the Future of DevOps?
With the growing adoption of DevOps, it is going to gain more traction than ever in the coming years. With the organizations being more focused on improving their organization cultures, and methodologies, the application of DevOps is set to become more prominent than ever in diverse sectors and areas. Below are some of the key use cases of DevOps that are going to be even more prominent in the coming years.
- FinTech and online trading
- Aviation industry
- SaaS companies
- IT and operations
- Automotive sector
- Software development
- eCommerce
To name a few.
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