QA Revolution

DevOps 101: Learn all about DevOps

What is DevOps?

DevOps»DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.

»Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams are no longer “siloed.” Sometimes, these two teams are merged into a single team where the engineers work across the entire application lifecycle, from development and test to deployment to operations, and develop a range of skills not limited to a single function.  and security teams may also become more tightly integrated with development and operations and throughout the application lifecycle.

»These teams use practices to automate processes that historically have been manual and slow. They use a technology stack and tooling which help them operate and evolve applications quickly and reliably. These tools also help engineers independently accomplish tasks (for example, deploying code or provisioning infrastructure) that normally would have required help from other teams, and this further increases a team’s velocity.


DevOps Benefits

Here are some DevOps benefits:

  • Speed: Move faster as a team so there will  be more product produced
  • Quality: Develop higher quality products with faster feedback loops resulting in continuous quality deliveries
  • Collaboration: Smaller teams work more efficiently together and eliminate organizational silos
  • Scale: Manage development and infrastructure leveraging automation to accelerate productivity
  • Security: Using a DevOps model companies can ensure security compliance

Developing a Quality DevOps Mindset

»Customer is #1

»Frequent delivery of a working software product

»Develop a quality product over production delivery

»Keep technical debt at a minimum

»Constant communication with all team members

»Keep things simple as possible

»Hold meaningful and actionable retrospective sessions

»Automate as much as possible


DevOps Myths

»DevOps will fix everything

»DevOps is for Developers and Operations only

»DevOps only involves automating processes

»DevOps only uses “Cloud

»DevOps only uses new languages and technologies

»DevOps is only for web based systems

»DevOps is only used by small companies

»DevOps is not necessary for my organization


DevOps History

»2008- Patrick Debois helps plant the seeds of the DevOps movement at the Agile conference in Toronto

»2009-O’Reilly Velocity Conference—John Allspaw and Paul Hammond deliver a seminal talk known as “10+ Deploys per Day”

»2009-Debois launches the first Devopsdays event, in Ghent, Belgium

»2010-The first US DevOpsdays is organized, with the help of Willis as well as other early DevOps proponents like Damon Edwards and Andrew Clay Shafer

»2011- Cameron Haight from Gartner, among others, predicts that by 2015, 20 percent of global 2000 businesses will embrace DevOps.

»2012-various Devopsdays are suddenly popping up around the world, from Bangalore to Boston.

»2013-Various DevOps books emerge: Phoenix Project (Kim), Implementing Lean Software Development” (Poppendiek), The Lean Startup (Ries), Web Operations (Allspaw), Continuous Delivery, (Humble and David Farley) and The Goal (Goldratt)

»2014-DevOps crosses into the enterprise, and established brands like Target, Nordstrom and LEGO embrace the movement. In a survey by Puppet Labs, IT Revolution Press and ThoughtWorks, 16 percent of 1,485 respondents say they are part of a DevOps effort within their organization.

2016-DevOps is now mainstream


DevOps Goals

»Build repeatable processes and high quality software

»Automate everything

»Definition of Done

»Reduce Risk

»Collaborative Ownership-Everyone is responsible

»Constant communication

»Continuous Improvements

I hope this information has been helpful. I also have a DevOps 101 video. and a DevOps 201 video.

If you would like more information on Agile, DevOps or Software Testing, please visit my Software Testing Blog or my Software Testing YouTube Channel.

Ron Wilson