Throughout the years’, the adoption of DevOps has increased in a number of different sectors and has come a long way in order for companies to stay ahead of the game quickly and efficiently.
As we all know, in regards to faster time-to-market, there is no room for errors as it can, potentially, lower business value and ruin brands. Because of this, enterprises are encouraging testing and development teams to use contemporary methodologies, frameworks and tools such as Kubernetes to increase the deployment of applications and software.
This is where DevOps comes in useful, bringing development and IT operations together to enhance collaboration between an array of functions.
Andrew Hardie, Chairman of the BCS DevSecOps Expert Group, commented: “DevOps is about speed. Speed through automation, reliability and consistency. Automation deals with commit, build, package, test, promote and deploy, with multiple levels of test and deploy for each environment (dev, sit, nft, pre-prod, prod).”
Speed, quality & innovation
Here are some of the key reasons to adopt DevOps, if you haven’t already!
- Continuous testing, continuous integration and continuous deployment is a part of the DevOps methodology, enabling shorter development cycles, accelerating deployment frequencies, and making the software release process more dependable
- DevOps ensures that the quality of the software release is maintained, supporting enterprises to meet their set business objectives regularly
- It works towards facilitating teams with continuous feedback and improvement even in production, enabling automated release testing, continuous integration testing and continuous planning
- DevOps supports automated tests for front-end, middle tier and backend validations, meaning quality check-gates are created and maintained at every stage of the software testing cycle
- Agile and flexibility in development processes ensures speed, quality and innovation.
DevOps & Kubernetes
DevOps teams are committed to open source tools such as Kubernetes, as most DevOps engineers adopt it in place of closed-source alternatives.
Hardie agreed: “When implementing DevOps, you should also add monitoring, event logging, metrics and tracing, as well as GitOps for declarative environment promotion. Kubernetes is also evolving very fast.
“Keeping up is a struggle, both for vendors and DevOps professionals. A new ecosystem tool appears every week, or sooner. Deployment is no longer procedural but declarative. Build and package tools (e.g. Maven, Docker) disappear behind the curtain of automation.”
More and more firms appear to be turning to Kubernetes and microservices platforms to add more agility and, in many cases, computing power to their IT operations, while serverless deployments mainly seen as a way to save resources by relegating server management to third-parties.
“For the developer, everything between code commit and code deploy becomes automated and invisible. They see only test failure report or successful deployment. The DevOps team are the ones doing all the hard work to make that happen, keep it happening, keep it up-to-date and keep it secure,” Hardie added.
Hardie has been “online” since 1982 and automating IT systems since 1991. In that time, he has worked for seven parliaments, eight UK Government departments, three Local Authorities, Tony Blair’s private office, the Royal Household, the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, two of the “big five” UK banks, two hi-tech startups and three international NGOs. Andrew is a well-known figure on the London DevOps scene and a regular speaker at conferences and Meetups. He is also Chairman of the BCS DevSecOps Expert Group.
Written by Leah Alger
