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What is DevOps?

2 min read

Definition: DevOps (a portmanteau of Development and Operations) is a set of practices, tools, and a cultural philosophy that automates and integrates the processes between software development and IT teams. It emphasizes team empowerment, cross-team communication, and technology automation.

The Main Goal: To shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.

The Core Pillars (C.A.L.M.S.)

  • Culture: Breaking down “silos.” Developers and Operations teams share responsibility for the product from concept to grave (You build it, you run it).
  • Automation: Automating manual, repetitive tasks (testing, infrastructure provisioning, deployment) to increase speed and reduce human error.
  • Lean: Applying Lean manufacturing principles (minimizing waste, visualizing work in progress, limiting batch sizes).
  • Measurement: Using data to track performance (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, time to restore service).
  • Sharing: Open feedback loops between teams to share knowledge and solutions.

The DevOps Lifecycle (The Infinity Loop)

DevOps is often represented as an infinite loop comprising these stages:

  1. Plan: Define capabilities and requirements.
  2. Code: Write code and conduct code reviews.
  3. Build: Compile code and package it.
  4. Test: Automated testing (Unit, Integration, UI).
  5. Release: Manage, coordinate, and schedule releases.
  6. Deploy: Release code into production.
  7. Operate: Manage and maintain the IT infrastructure.
  8. Monitor: Track performance and user experience (feedback loop back to Plan).

Key Technical Practices

  • CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment): Merging code changes frequently and automatically deploying them to production.
  • IaC (Infrastructure as Code): Managing and provisioning infrastructure through code and configuration files rather than physical hardware configuration (e.g., Terraform, Ansible).
  • Microservices: Building applications as a collection of small services rather than one monolithic block.
  • Monitoring & Logging: Real-time visibility into the health of the application (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana).

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