The Development and Operations Process
What is the Developer Operations Process?
The software development world has changed dramatically over the years. DevOps has been at the forefront of these changes, and it has led to many other innovations in the world of computer programming.
What is the DevOps process?
The main thing to note is that it is tied to DevSecOps and other cloud development and security processes. In fact, cloud security derives a lot of its processes from what has come from Developer Operations.
You can think of Developer and Operations as a sister to software engineering. It focuses on streamlining and making the entire software development process easier, and it also focuses on the deployment aspect. That is even more vital since we are in the age of developer cloud.
What are the four basic stages of Developer Operations?
These four stages are:
- Plan
- Planning
- Develop
- Coding
- Building
- Testing
- Monitoring
- Operate
- Operating
- Deploy
- Deploying
- Releasing
Each stage corresponds to the software engineering and coding cycle. It also corresponds to the operations cycle that must happen when your software has been deployed.
What is the importance of the DevOps process?
The process is crucial because it contains a simple number of reproducible steps. It is a template that every IT company can use to streamline its operations.
It can reduce the complexity of software engineering, and it also makes the process more reliable. By using this simple process, companies can shorten the coding cycle and save thousands or even millions of dollars.
They can also ensure that the software they create is more robust and efficient. Overall, it provides benefits for everyone.
Plan
You can think of this step as the preparation step. It is where all the stakeholders must come together and decide what the end product will look like. It is also the place we put together all the tools you think you will need.
For example, what tools will you need to create to make the engineering process easier? How will you test your application?
These are some of the questions you will need to answer as you go through this process. It is usually the step that causes a lot of software engineering projects to fail.
Develop
This is usually the meat and potatoes of the actual engineering cycle. It is where the rubber meets the road, and developers have to build something. It is also where your developers need to test and figure out what they will do to monitor the running application.
Continuous integration and deployment are needed at this stage. Continuous integration means continually testing and evaluating the application while you develop it.
Many developers can now build the entire application daily. The pipeline ensures that they can do the tests automatically as well. It means that you never lose more than a day of work if something fails. It also means you don’t build bad code on top of each other until your software is too much to fix.
Operate
Automating the operations side is also a crucial function of Developer Operations. Many things can go wrong while running a program, so your engineers need to have ways of evaluating the program and correcting mistakes.
They also need ways of automating this process as well. While running your program, there are many ways you will want to improve things.
For example, how will your application scale? Is that process automated? Simple things like this are what happens in this part of the process.
Deploy
Deploying a project is now made more complicated than ever with cloud development and security.
Cloud computing has changed how developers create software, and it has also added a lot of different wrinkles to the process. It has improved many facets of technology, but it is also brought a lot of complexity. It is this complexity that can be fixed with the Developer Operations process.
With this process, the deployment cycle can be shortened dramatically, and developers will be releasing software with fewer bugs. It makes it possible to turbocharge your ability to develop and deploy applications on a previously unimaginable scale.
Ultimately, Developer Operations will only get more critical as software engineering takes its place as a centerpiece of our modern digital society.