What is DevOps? The Complete Guide

In the world of software development, speed and quality are paramount. Traditional systems often struggle, cursed by slow deployments and communication gaps between siloed development and operations teams. Enter DevOps, a transformative approach breaking down these barriers.

What is DevOps?

DevOps (development and operations) isn't a set of rules and regulations but rather a cultural shift that emphasizes collaboration and automation. It creates a shared responsibility for the entire application lifecycle, from initial concept to ongoing maintenance. Development and operations teams work together throughout the process, identifying and fixing issues earlier in the cycle. This team strategy leads to faster launches of high-quality software, giving businesses a competitive edge.

Imagine a streamlined development pipeline where code changes trigger automated builds and tests, catching issues and failures early. DevOps facilitates this by weaving continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices. 

Developers focus on innovation, while automated systems minimize errors and ensure consistent releases. The result? Satisfied users and a business that thrives in a rapidly evolving market.

How does DevOps work?

At its core, lies a set of principles and practices automating and integrating processes involved in software development environment, testing, deployment, and monitoring. This typically involves a DevOps pipeline. More specifically, a CI/CD pipeline that automates the building, testing, and deployment of applications. Code is continuously integrated into a central repository, where automated tests are triggered to identify and fix bugs early in the development process. Once the code passes the tests, it is automatically deployed to production or staging environments.

Phases of the DevOps lifecycle

The DevOps lifecycle is a continuous, iterative process designed to foster collaboration and enhance product quality. Here's an overview of the key phases: 

1. Plan: Stakeholders from both development and operations collaborate to create a roadmap, identify resources required, and set timelines.

2. Code: Developers begin coding and implementing the plan into tangible features and functions. 

3. Build: The completed code is compiled into a build that can be deployed into a testing or production environment.

4. Test: Automated tests are run against the build, including unit tests, integration tests, and performance tests, to ensure the software meets quality standards.

5. Release: Once testing is complete and the software is deemed ready, it's released into a production or staging environment. 

6. Deploy: The software is deployed to the production environment where end-users can access it. 

7. Operate: Operations teams monitor the software's performance in the production environment, ensuring it runs smoothly and efficiently. 

8. Monitor: Continuous monitoring of the application's performance and user feedback is essential for identifying issues, understanding user experience, and planning future improvements.

9. Feedback and Improve: Insights gathered from monitoring and feedback are fed into the planning phase, re-starting the cycle.

Benefits of DevOps

Standard development strategies, often hampered by siloed teams and sluggish results, can need help to meet these demands. That’s where development and operations come in. This corporate cultural shift goes beyond buzzwords – it unlocks benefits that empower businesses to achieve a significant competitive edge.

DevOps offers a multitude of benefits for businesses of all sizes. Here are a few key advantages:

Collaboration and communication

DevOps relies on seamless collaboration and open communication between development, operations, and security teams. This dismantles barriers, allowing growth for understanding and a more efficient workflow. Developers gain valuable insights into operations realities, while operations teams can anticipate development needs. 

This synergy leads to several key benefits:

• Faster Problem Solving: Open communication channels, like shared dashboards and internal chat platforms, allow developers to easily reach out to operations for guidance. This collaborative approach minimizes downtime and ensures a more efficient workflow.

• Data-Driven Decision-Making: Teams leverage data from shared dashboards to make informed decisions that optimize software development. By understanding the impact of their choices across different areas, teams can make strategic adjustments to streamline the process.

• Continuous Improvement: Employees learn from successes and failures, iterate on processes, and identify areas for improvement. This ongoing cycle of collaboration ensures that DevOps practices remain effective and evolve. 

Development outcomes

By automating repetitive tasks and integrating testing throughout the development process, DevOps engineers and developers can focus on innovation and deliver features faster. Early identification and resolution of bugs lead to higher-quality software.

Product quality

Traditionally, software quality was often an afterthought, addressed through testing phases late in the development cycle. This reactive approach led to discovering critical bugs just before or even after release, causing delays, rework, and frustrated users. DevOps disrupts this, transforming quality from a phase to a core principle woven through the development life cycle. 

By utilizing shift testing, CI/DI, sharing responsibility and feedback, DevOps empowers teams to deliver high-quality products faster. 

Deployment management

DevOps automates the deployment process, making it faster and more reliable. This reduces the risk of errors and ensures that new features and bug fixes can be delivered to production quickly and efficiently. Faster deployments of new features and bug errors give businesses a competitive edge.

DevOps best practices

Creating a DevOps team grants businesses of all sizes access to benefits. Yet, to truly harness the power of DevOps and achieve advantages, it’s crucial to implement a set of best practices. To reap the full benefits of DevOps, it's important to follow these practices. Here are a few key considerations:

Augment the DevOps Pipeline with AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be a powerful tool for enhancing the DevOps pipeline. DevOps best practices encourage leveraging AI for tasks like code review. AI can analyze code for potential security vulnerabilities, coding style inconsistencies, or logical errors, freeing developers for more strategic problem-solving. Additionally, AI can be used for performance optimization, analyzing application behavior, and suggesting areas for improvement.

Utilize Shift-Left Service-Level Objectives (SLOs)

Typically, performance considerations are often addressed later in the development cycle. DevOps best practices advocate for “shifting left” this approach, SLOs are a set of metrics that define the acceptable performance of a service. By shifting left SLOs, you can define and measure performance targets earlier in the development process, ensuring that applications meet performance expectations from the outset.

Adopt Cloud-Native Architecture

Agility and scalability are crucial for any business. Cloud-native architecture is a design approach that leverages the benefits of cloud computing. By automating workloads in a cloud-native architecture, you can take advantage of features such as scalability, elasticity, and pay-as-you-go pricing, which can streamline your DevOps processes.

Adopt a platform-driven approach with self-service processes

Envision is a world where developers have access to a self-service platform that allows them to develop, test, and deploy applications independently. This is the essence of a platform-driven approach, a DevOps best practice. This platform provides developers with the necessary tools and resources, including pre-configured environments, automated testing frameworks, and deployment pipelines. Supporting developers and streamlining the development process.

Leverage automation

Automation is a cornerstone of DevOps. Automating repetitive tasks such as testing, deployment, and configuration management can free up your teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Emphasize communication/collaboration

Effective communication and collaboration are essential for successful DevOps implementation. Teams need to have clear communication channels and established processes for working together.

By following these best practices, businesses can leverage DevOps to achieve faster deployments, higher-quality software, and a more efficient development process.

DevOps is not Kryptonite, but it is a powerful approach that can transform how software is developed and delivered. By fostering collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement, DevOps can help businesses achieve their software development goals and deliver exceptional value to their customers.

DevOps phases

DevOps is not a linear process; instead, it's a series of collaborative phases that work together to deliver applications and services. These phases include Plan, Develop, Deliver, and Operate. Each phase relies on the others and should not be considered role-specific. In a true DevOps culture, each role is involved in each phase to some extent.

Plan

The planning phase is the foundation for successful DevOps projects. In this phase, cross-functional teams come together to define the project goals, scope, and timelines.  This may involve activities such as:

• Defining business requirements: What problem are we trying to solve? What are the business goals for this project?

• Infrastructure planning: What infrastructure is needed to support the application? Will we use on-premises infrastructure, the cloud, or a hybrid model?

• Version control planning: How will we track changes to the code and configuration? What version control system will we use?

• Security planning: How will we secure the application and its data? What DevSecOps (development, security, and operations) best practices will we follow?

By carefully planning these aspects upfront, teams can set the stage for a smooth and efficient development process.

Develop

The development phase is where the application code is written, tested, and integrated.  In a DevOps environment, development teams embrace automation to streamline these processes. Here are some key aspects of the development phase:

• Continuous integration (CI): Code changes are frequently merged into a central repository, triggering automated builds and tests. This helps to identify and fix bugs early in the development process.

• Continuous testing (CT): A wide range of automated tests ensure that the application meets quality standards. This may include unit tests, integration tests, and performance tests.

• Infrastructure as code (IaC): Infrastructure configurations are managed as code, allowing for provisioning and configuration to be automated. This ensures consistency and repeatability across environments.

By embracing automation and continuous feedback, development teams can deliver high-quality software faster.

Deliver

The delivery phase in DevOps centers on getting the application into production environments. Here, automation reigns supreme. By automating the deployment process, DevOps minimizes human error and ensures consistent rollouts. 

One key aspect of the delivery phase is continuous delivery (CD). Once rigorous testing within the CI/CD pipeline is complete, code changes can be automatically deployed to production. This eliminates the need for manual deployments and significantly reduces the time it takes to get new features and bug fixes into the user's hands. Faster deployments translate to success. 

Deployment pipelines are the backbone of this automation. These pipelines guide the entire deployment process, handling tasks like building the application, provisioning the necessary infrastructure in the cloud, and running configuration scripts. Streamlining these processes minimizes the risk of errors. 

DevOps also embraces techniques like blue/green launches to further mitigate risk. For example, users can deploy a new application version to a separate environment (green) while the existing version continues to run in production (blue). Once the new version is thoroughly tested and validated in the green environment, traffic is seamlessly switched over.

Operate

The operating phase focuses on monitoring the application in production and addressing any issues that arise. In a DevOps environment, the goal is to proactively monitor the application and identify and fix problems quickly.  Here are some key aspects of the operation phase:

• Application performance monitoring (APM): APM tools provide this crucial insight, constantly monitoring performance metrics like response times, resource utilization, and error rates. By identifying performance bottlenecks early, teams can proactively address them before they impact user experience. This ensures your application delivers optimal performance and meets user expectations. 

• Log management: Applications and infrastructure generate a wealth of data in the form of logs. DevOps leverages log management rolls to collect, analyze, and store these logs. By sifting through these logs, teams can identify potential issues like errors, security threats, or configuration problems.

• Incident management: Even with the best planning, unforeseen issues arise in production. A robust management process is crucial for handling these situations effectively. DevOps emphasizes a collaborative approach to indecent management, with clearly defined roles and procedures for identifying, responding to, and resolving incidents. This creates a swift response to any problems that may impact the application's availability or performance. 

By proactively monitoring the application and having a plan in place for incident management, teams can ensure that the application is running smoothly and meeting the needs of users.

DevOps is a collaborative approach to software development that emphasizes automation, continuous feedback, and shared responsibility. By following these phases, teams can deliver high-quality software faster and more reliably.

How Freshservice can assist with DevOps practices

The world of software development is in constant flux. Traditional fences between development and operations are crumbling, replaced by a disruptive approach called DevOps. This shift demands powerful tools to streamline workflows, bridge communication gaps, and empower teams. That's where Freshservice steps in, offering a comprehensive solution that fuels your DevOps practices.

Freshservice understands the core DevOps principles: automation, continuous feedback, and shared responsibility for application lifecycle management.  Here's how Freshservice empowers your DevOps journey:

1. Breaking Down Barriers: The Cornerstone of Collaboration

DevOps thrives on open communication and collaboration, where development and operations teams work together seamlessly. Freshservice acts as a central hub, fostering this collaboration through a suite of features designed to break down traditional silos.

Imagine a scenario where a developer encounters an issue in production. Freshservice's incident management system empowers them to raise a ticket, which is complete with detailed descriptions and logs. Operations teams can then collaborate on troubleshooting steps, track progress updates, and share relevant information within the platform. This centralized approach ensures everyone is on the same page, leading to faster issue resolution and minimized downtime.

Furthermore, Freshservice creates an objective of self-sufficiency through its self-service portal. This portal empowers developers to find solutions independently. A comprehensive knowledge base packed with articles, FAQs, and troubleshooting guides allows developers to resolve common issues without relying on operations teams for every hurdle. This frees up valuable time for operations teams and fosters a sense of ownership and problem-solving skills among developers.

Finally, Freshservice integrates seamlessly with popular internal chat platforms. A real-time communication channel proves invaluable during troubleshooting sessions and collaboration. Teams share updates, ask clarifying questions, and brainstorm solutions instantly, expediting the resolution process and ensuring a smooth development workflow. By bridging the communication gap and welcoming collaboration, Freshservice empowers DevOps teams to work together as a cohesive unit, ultimately achieving faster deployments and higher-quality software. 

2. Automation Powerhouse: Streamlining Workflows for Efficiency

Freshservice understands the value of automation in DevOps. It offers a range of features designed to automate repetitive tasks and free up valuable team resources:

• Automated Workflows: Define automated workflows that trigger specific actions based on predefined criteria. This can automate actions like notifying developers of critical incidents or escalating tickets requiring urgent attention.

• Service Catalog: Standardize service offerings with a comprehensive service catalog. This allows developers to quickly request infrastructure resources or deployments with pre-configured settings, minimizing manual configuration errors.

• Approval Workflows: Implement automated approval workflows for deployments or changes, ensuring adherence to security protocols and regulatory compliance.

3. Continuous Feedback and Monitoring:  Ensuring Quality and Performance

DevOps grows from learning and improvement. Freshservice integrates seamlessly with your existing DevOps toolchain to provide valuable insights throughout the entire development lifecycle, ensuring exceptional quality and performance for your products and services.

Having a centralized platform that tracks every change made to your infrastructure and applications can change your life. Freshservice's change management capabilities provide precisely that. This detailed audit trail becomes invaluable during troubleshooting.  When an issue arises in production, operations teams can leverage this historical data to pinpoint the exact change that might have introduced the problem. Facilitating root cause analysis, allowing teams to resolve issues swiftly and prevent similar regressions from occurring in the future.

Freshservice goes beyond just tracking changes, though. It encourages proactive performance management through real-time dashboards. These dashboards can be configured to display key metrics such as response times, resource utilization, and error rates. By getting ahead of monitoring these metrics, teams identify potential performance flops before they impact user experience. 

Freshworks’ Freshservice creates a continuous feedback loop between development and operations teams. When integrating with popular issue-tracking systems and code repositories, Freshservice allows for seamless communication of bugs and issues identified in production.  

Through Freshservice, users can easily report the issue with relevant logs and error messages. This information is then routed directly to the development team members within the same platform. A closed-loop communication system ensures swift issue resolution and minimizes the time it takes to deploy fixes, ultimately leading to a more stable and reliable application.

4. Embracing ITIL for a Structured DevOps Approach

While DevOps emphasizes agile software development practices, a structured approach is still crucial for maintaining control and ensuring stability. This is where ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) comes in. Freshservice, being ITIL-aligned, allows you also to leverage the strengths of DevOps methodologies, creating a detailed and efficient environment.

One key benefit of this combined approach is streamlined incident and problem management. Freshservice's incident management system adheres to ITIL best practices. Securing a well-defined process for identifying, prioritizing, and resolving incidents that occur in production. 

Additionally, Freshservice empowers teams to follow a structured approach, documenting the incident, collaborating on troubleshooting steps, and escalating to the appropriate personnel if needed. An efficient incident resolution process minimizes downtime and ensures a swift return to normal operations. Freshservice facilitates root cause analysis, a cornerstone of ITIL. When analyzing historical data and incident trends, teams can identify the underlying causes of problems and implement preventative measures to avoid future occurrences. 

Another advantage of this integration is ITIL-compliant change management within Freshservice. DevOps encourages rapid, continuous deployments, but uncontrolled changes can introduce instability. Freshservice ensures a balance between agility and control through its ITIL-aligned change management features.

Freshservice offers a documented and controlled deployment process, ensuring all necessary approvals are obtained, and proper rollback procedures are in place. This minimizes the risk of disruptions and ensures changes are implemented smoothly with minimal impact on the application's availability.

Finally, the focus on continual service improvement (CSI) inherent in ITIL aligns perfectly with the core principles of DevOps. Freshservice allows you to monitor and analyze your DevOps processes over time. Leveraging insights, teams identify areas for improvement and continuously refine their DevOps Practices. This data-driven approach ensures your DevOps environment becomes more efficient and effective over time, leading to faster deployments, higher-quality software, and a superior user experience.

Freshservice: Your DevOps Companion

Freshservice isn't just a service desk; it's a comprehensive platform that empowers your DevOps journey. By fostering collaboration, streamlining workflows, and providing valuable insights, Freshservice helps bridge the gap between development and operations, leading to faster deployments, higher-quality software, and a happier end-user experience.