Insights

What is DevOps, and where are all the Ops going?

Andy Morin, Chief Solution Architect – UST Xpanxion

For decades, the functions of software development and operations have occurred in disparate silos. Developers built the software and applications. Operations tested and deployed them on the company’s infrastructure. There was little-to-no crossover or sharing of procedures, systems, tools, software, or communication among these two roles. This lack of synergy between development and operations was a pesky issue that businesses worked around for a long time until it became an insurmountable obstacle to digital transformation, automation, and remaining relevant.

In the digital world, where applications underpin every plausible digital transformation and automation project on the planet, success hinges on a company’s capacity to churn flawless advanced software and applications at record velocity consistently. The move to digital magnified this disconnect between development and operations. It amplified the dire need for organizations to make fundamental changes to nearly every aspect of their business–from their infrastructure to their team structures and how they operate, communicate, and collaborate.

Digital-first organizations adopted transformative business models that blurred the lines between IT and operational technology functions to tear down these silos and force cross-functional team collaboration. They embraced avant-garde technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning and adopted modern IT infrastructures such as cloud and edge computing, microservices, and containers to gain the efficiency, precision, and speed required by the applications and software that drive automation and digital transformation.

For most organizations, DevOps represents the first move toward business transformation and how applications and software are built, tested, and deployed today. DevOps removes the barriers between the traditionally siloed teams of development and operations. In a DevOps environment, development and operations teams work concurrently across the entire software or application lifecycle–from integration, testing, and releasing to infrastructure management.

Though DevOps defines the standard way to build, test, and release software and applications in the digital world, it’s important to note that for all that DevOps is, it is not just a technology. Instead, DevOps is a multidisciplinary methodology and cultural philosophy in which development and operations exist side-by-side. Essentially, DevOps integrates people, processes, and technology to shorten development lifecycles and continuously deliver high-quality software and applications.

THE DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS OF DEVOPS

Since DevOps is part of cultural philosophy, it means something different to everyone. Consequently, it looks distinct to each organization. However, successful DevOps environments share the same defining characteristics, which include the use of the following:

• Real-time continuous integration and delivery/deployment (CI/CD) pipelines and other automation tools to monitor and move code (and equipment) across each step of the application lifecycle. CI/CDs are how code is built and released into production and how businesses can catch costly errors before the software reaches the production stage.
• Tools and software that aid DevOps environments, such as real-time monitoring, incident management, configuration management, and collaboration platforms.
• Cloud and edge computing, containers, and microservices are executed together with DevOps techniques.

Also, DevOps is complementary to agile development software since some aspects of DevOps came from the Agile Manifesto, a document that specifies an iterative approach to project management and software development to help teams adapt and respond to change fast so they can deliver value to their customers quickly and consistently.

Similar to agile, the four main benefits of DevOps are reliability, cost reduction, speed, and quality. Agile DevOps helps businesses move and adjust to market changes at the rate of innovation.

DEVOPS IS EVOLVING, AND ITS FUTURE LOOKS OPULENT

The power of DevOps to tear down the barriers between departments and functions to make vast improvements in how applications and software are built, tested, and deployed, is now extending beyond the software development world and continues to evolve. Just as DevOps created an automated lifecycle between software development and IT operations, it has found opportunities to do the same elsewhere.

So, what can we expect from DevOps in the future? Nothing short of an era of Ops. Today, digital-first businesses are applying the concept of DevOps to different functions that cross IT operations. Here are just a few opulent examples (pun intended) of DevOps evolving in clever ways:

• DevSecOps (development, security, and operations) is a development practice that automates security integration at every stage of the software development lifecycle. With DevSecOps, developers can produce reliable and secure applications.
• AppOps (application operations) is a set of self-service tools that let developers manage the infrastructure at a higher level by streamlining application analysis, deployment, and management.
• AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations) is the practice of applying big data, advanced analytics, and machine learning models to automate IT operational workflows.
• MLOps (machine learning operations) is a set of processes and best practices that combine machine learning, DevOps, and data engineering, allowing DevOps teams to deploy and maintain machine learning models in production.
• DataOps (data operations) is a collection of technical practices, workflows, cultural criteria, and architectural patterns that improve the communication, integration, and automation of data flows between data managers and data consumers across an organization.

And then there are NoOps (no operations), which is quite possibly the ultimate Ops. NoOps is the idea that an IT environment can become increasingly automated and abstracted from the underlying infrastructure to the point where there is no further need for a dedicated, in-house team to manage it. We haven't yet reached the hyper-automation (i.e., no human needed) point of NoOps, but it is inevitable.

Is your business ready to take on the era of Ops? At UST Xpanxion, we leverage DevOps methodologies to streamline and automate application development and business processes across the spectrum of IT and operations. Read our case studies and learn how we’ve helped companies of all sizes across markets quickly shift into the world of DevOps and advanced automation to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives, enhance the developer and customer experience, and automate deployments that increase productivity and add business value.

Contact our DevOps experts to learn more.