DevOps Implementation Roadmap and Advantages

When it comes to software development, DevOps is a methodology that brings maximum efficiency. It is a flexible method that combines various tools, philosophies, and practices to offer agility in the development process. And this is why the majority of the organizations are shifting from the traditional approach to DevOps Culture. But still, many software development companies fail to successfully implement DevOps, therefore, here in this blog, we will go through the DevOps implementation roadmap which can help you understand the implementation process thoroughly, and then we will have a look at the advantages of DevOps.

1. Successful DevOps Implementation Roadmap

DevOps implementation is a concept that integrates operations, development, and testing departments together in cross-functional software development teams. The main aim of this is to improve the agility of the IT services. Basically, the approach of DevOps implementation is categorized into three sections – DevOps Continuous Integration (build), DevOps Continuous Testing (test), and DevOps Continuous Delivery (release). And this helps companies to shift from the traditional approach and change the software development methods as per the DevOps concept. For this, a few steps must be taken into consideration and they are – 

1.1 Organize a DevOps Initiative

The first step to follow while shifting from the traditional software development method to DevOps is to organize a DevOps initiative for the IT department. By doing so, all the team members will get an opportunity to make necessary changes in the operational and development phase. In this initial phase, the CIO of the IT firm organizes everything and arranges financial investments in the best way possible. Besides this, the program manager will be responsible for designing and monitoring the DevOps implementation process. 

1.2 DevOps Strategy Creation

The next step is to start creating the DevOps strategy which means that the project manager will use DevOps tools, principles and best practices that can help in improving interdepartmental collaboration. Besides, it also includes coming up with new ways of software development & testing, and infrastructure provisioning. Some of such best practices are – 

• Automate software development, unit testing, software integrating, application testing via UI, deploying, and launching different processes to speed up the software development and testing releasing cycle.
• Another practice is to implement IaC that ensures the early provision of the IT infrastructure as per the request of software developers and testers. And this is required while developing a new build or checking its quality. This process enables the DevOps experts to get new software development & testing infrastructure and avoid human errors.

1.3 Containerizing

After creating the DevOps strategy, containerization is implemented. For this, tools like Docker are used to solve software reliability issues. In this process, containers come with everything that is needed to run an application. Here, various pieces of applications are put together into several containers and this makes it easier for the operations team to update an app as it doesn’t require rebuilding the entire application when there are only smaller changes.

1.4 Infrastructure Automation Integration with CI/CD Tools

When a software application is put into containers, managing the containerized application is very important. For this process, infrastructure automation tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, CloudFormation, and Kubernetes are used with CI/CD tools such as Azure DevOps, AWS Pipelines, GoCD, Jenkins, and Bamboo. This integration enables efficient software deployment and configuration management. 

Let’s make it more simple by having a look at an example. For instance, if the developer uses Kubernetes for large infrastructures and or Ansible for smaller app infrastructures, this enables the team to monitor the container’s health, manage containers for fault tolerance, and roll software updates. After that, when it comes to creating, testing, and deploying new builds in the Kubernetes tools, it can be done using Jenkins.

1.5 Test Automation and Aligning QA with Development

The next step is to achieve faster delivery with the help of DevOps. For this, software development teams need to carry out sufficient automated testing. But not each type of testing can be automated; therefore, the team needs to perform usability, exploratory, and security testing manually. This still depends on the efforts required for automated testing. Besides this, the DevOps experts must carry out development and testing activities in tandem to avoid bugs before releasing the build.

1.6 Performance Monitoring

The last step that comes in converting a firm’s traditional approach to DevOps, application performance monitoring, is required. It helps in offering transparency over various performance problems to the DevOps teams. And all these problems can be revealed during the processes like user experience monitoring, application server monitoring, and more. Here, application performance monitoring enables isolating, detecting, and prioritizing the defects of the app before the user finds them and for this tools like Nagios and Prometheus are used. 

2. Advantages of DevOps Implementation

DevOps is used by the developers to overcome the drawbacks that traditional software development methods had and to carry out modern IT operations. With a wide range of new technologies and practices available in the market, software development companies find it easier to implement DevOps and start developing, testing and deploying apps faster than organizations that are still utilizing traditional approaches. Here’s an example from an IT giant itself about the successful implementation of Devops.

To know more about this, here we will go through some of the main advantages of DevOps and see how it is changing the way software developers work – 

2.1 Constant Communication among All the Teams

When it comes to using DevOps, it is not just about picking the right methodologies and tools. It’s also about right and constant communication between the team members while implementing. This is why project managers say that there must be proper communication among team members at every stage of the software development.

And to achieve smooth communication during DevOps implementation, companies must introduce open-source communities like GitLab, to provide their teams with a platform that can help in planning, creating, verifying, and releasing the software while collaborating with other team members. In this case, the one thing that matters more is team members’ understanding behavior and mutual responsibility for each other. And this is essential as it enables the software development team members to realize the importance of faster releases. 

Basically, constant engagement between the team members enables them to have a common goal and focus completely on providing user satisfaction. In addition to this, organizations must also promote a knowledge-sharing environment which helps in improving the business perspective.

2.2 Fewer Software Failures

One of the most important things about DevOps implementation is having a proper understanding of the application being developed and knowledge of its requirements. This helps in aligning the infrastructure design with the firm’s goals and making a business-dive DevOps implementation. Here, all the project’s release cycles are assessed and environments are tested to identify potential bottlenecks and areas for improvement. 

Basically, successful implementation of DevOps is incomplete without incorporating continuous deployment and integration into your workflow. And this is because when there is continuous integration, the development team gets a chance to create regular, small stages and identify the issues and resolve them early. Besides, the continuous delivery allows them to deploy all the changes in production frequently.

2.3 Fast Provision of New Infrastructure

When the DevOps team wants to quickly prepare and deliver new infrastructure for software development, designing, testing, and production, they apply the IaC approach. This means that when the infrastructure exists as a ready-made code phase, the DevOps developer would require new infrastructure for a new project, and for that, they won’t have to wait till the system administrators offer it. 

2.4 Test Automation

With the implementation of DevOps, continuous testing will be possible. And this is one of the biggest advantages of the DevOps approach. So to achieve it, the DevOps team uses specialized tools that test everything automatically. For instance, Zephyr, Selenium, and Tricentis Tosca are the tools that are designed to automatically perform different tests like functional testing, unit testing, and integration testing. These tools have the capability to notify the DevOps experts immediately when bugs are detected.

2.5 Quick and Reliable Delivery of Application Updates

Because of the collaboration between ARA (application release automation) and the DevOps-related teams, the software can be updated much faster than in the traditional method. ARA enables the deployment process to accelerate with minimal configuration errors and downtime that might occur when a new build is being deployed manually. 

2.6 Reduced Number of Errors

With the DevOps implementation, when there is a continuous testing process going on and it is aligned with the production environments, the quality analysis team will have to spend less time in the testing process and still, no errors will be missed. 

2.7 Improvement in Users’ Trust

DevOps increases the rate of test automation and reduces the number of post-release errors. When any company is implementing DevOps, they can easily convince the business users of the software’s quality and for that, one thing that they can do is have excellent communication within the team and with the users. The development team can involve end-users in defining the tests to be automated, which ensures sufficient testing coverage. 

3. Conclusion

As seen in this blog, when any company decides to implement DevOps, they must consider various things like implementation time, new technologies, and organizational efforts that are required for the successful initiation of the DevOps. And this success of its implementation enables the development teams to deliver software more rapidly without compromising the quality of the software or the process. For all this to happen, the transformation of both IT infrastructure arrangement and the software development process is required. And DevOps can help in making the IT infrastructure of any firm reliable with the help of the strong collaboration between the DevOps-related teams.  

Basically, DevOps implementation and following DevOps principles and best practices like IaC, CI/CD, total application monitoring, testing automation, and others can help in changing the entire approach of the organization.