12 Feb WHAT IS DEVOPS? AN EXPLAINER GUIDE
The idea of DevOps touches on the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity. It evolved from the need to improve collaboration and productivity between software development teams and IT operations teams as enterprise technology grew increasingly complex.
In traditional IT management, developers write and update code for applications while operations teams deploy and maintain that infrastructure. This separation often created bottlenecks as new features waited in long release cycles to go live while ops teams scrambled to manage updates.
DevOps culture breaks down barriers between teams by fostering better communication, integration and automation. The goal is continuous development, testing, deployment and monitoring of applications in rapid iteration. That accelerates an organization’s ability to innovate and respond to customers.
The process brings developers deeper into understanding operational requirements like security, availability and system resource utilization while bringing ops engineers closer to the developer lifecycle. Cross-functional teams use practices like load testing and configuration management to take shared ownership of an application’s operational robustness.
Automation then handles manual tasks as code progresses from revision to release stages while infrastructure dynamically scales to handle fluctuations. Monitoring telemetry and user feedback further optimize performance.
Enabling this speed and flexibility are open source DevOps tools like Kubernetes, Docker, Ansible and Jenkins which coordinate code releases across complex multi-cloud environments. AI assists with predictive analytics to preemptively tune systems while machine learning trains self-healing applications.
The collaborative framework supports enterprises craving more agility to keep pace with digital disruption across industries. Research shows high-performing IT teams using DevOps practices deploy code up to 30 times more frequently than rivals while recovering from failures faster.
For legacy companies, implementing DevOps requires serious cultural change and workforce training in new skillsets. But the rewards of faster innovation and delivery ultimately provide greater customer satisfaction, market share and revenue growth in competitive business climates.
