All about the fundamentals of DevOps

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All about the fundamentals of DevOps

Jobin Kuruvilla

June 16, 2023

8 min read

Jobin Kuruvilla

June 16, 2023

8 min read

DevOps is more than the unification of development and operations teams. And although they play a crucial role, it's more than tools and practices. For it to be fully embraced, DevOps should be viewed as a mindset that establishes new ways of working and new principles and processes.

In this blog series, we'll take a deep dive into DevOps. Among other topics, we'll explore its core principles, platform requirements and how it can help your business. But first, we get better acquainted with DevOps's core principles and fundamental processes.

Five key DevOps principles

The following vital principles help DevOps teams deliver applications and services at a faster pace and higher quality. Here are five essential principles when adopting or migrating a DevOps approach.

1. Collaboration

Collaboration is at the heart of DevOps. Development and operations come together to form a functional team that communicates, shares feedback and collaborates throughout the development and deployment cycle. Sometimes, this can result in the previously separate development and operations teams working together in a single team. A DevOps platform supports and enhances collaboration by providing a single space for your team to collaborate.

2. Automate everything possible

Automation is an essential component of DevOps. The general approach is to automate as much of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) as possible. By automating tasks in the development process, developers have more time to write code and build new features. Plus, it reduces human error and increases team productivity. Automated tasks and processes enable teams to improve with high cycle rates continuously. This facilitates instant feedback and fast response to the end-user or customer.

3. Continuous improvement

Continuous improvement is tied to continuous delivery (CD) and enables DevOps teams to push updates that improve software systems' efficiency constantly. This principle concerns incremental improvements and ongoing efforts to improve products, services or processes. This method seeks ways to streamline work and, in doing so, minimises waste, increases speed and brings better customer value. A constant pipeline of new releases eases delivery and encourages teams to be more experimental, improving innovation and creativity.

4. Customer-centric decision making

Teams can use DevOps practices—such as real-time live monitoring and rapid deployment—to streamline and speed up the process of gathering user feedback. With immediate visibility into how live users interact with a software system, teams can and should use that insight to develop further improvements. Under a DevOps methodology, organisations innovate continuously and are prepared to pivot when a strategy is ineffective. DevOps teams use short feedback loops with customers and end users to develop products and services based on user needs.

5. Create with the end in mind

DevOps teams understand customers' needs and create products or services based on solving real problems. It may mean that teams need to let go of their assumptions about how consumers will use the software. Instead, they need to understand the product thoroughly and continuously focus on the idea that they are building working products sold to actual customers. From creation to implementation, teams need to share an engineering mindset that will take them from envisioning to realising the product.

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DevOps fundamental processes

The nine steps in the DevOps lifecycle mentioned below drive production through continuous development, integration, testing, monitoring and feedback, delivery and deployment. Their focus is to close the loop between development and operations. When working correctly, each stage in the flow is a crucial driver to producing software with efficiency, reliability, speed and agility.

Here, we take a closer look at the critical stages:

Plan – the preliminary stage before any code is written is where you'd create a product roadmap to guide development and help the team be better organised.
Create – the first stage of the CI/CD pipeline is a crucial driver to increasing speed. In this stage, code is designed and developed using version control.
Verify – this step confirms the quality of the code. Feedback can be delivered quickly through security testing, code quality analysis, parallel execution and automation.
Package – this stage handles packaging applications and dependencies and manages containers to ensure a consistent software supply chain.
Release/deployment – now code updates are pushed into the production environment. Releases can be deployed as iterations are created, tested and ready and thus eliminates the need for a pre-planned, bulk release date.
Configure – in this stage, you set up, manage and maintain product environments. Through automated configuration management, you can leave automation to handle complex environments across servers, networks and storage systems.
Monitor – focuses on tracking software, infrastructure and networks. This proactive, automated part of the process alerts to problems and increases security, reliability and agility.
Protect – safeguards applications and their runtime environment from intrusions and vulnerabilities.
Manage – In this stage; you can manage permissions, regulate DevOps build and deployment processes and automate guardrails to meet security and compliance policies. It helps you achieve visibility and control across the end-to-end SDLC.

DevOps transformation with GitLab

GitLab helps you reach your digital transformation goals faster. With GitLab, your teams can automate your software delivery process; streamline and simplify continuous software compliance; integrate security across every stage of the development process; and collaborate and communicate via one shared platform.

6 key ways DevOps helps your business

Before starting your DevOps journey, read our top 6 ways it can help your business.

READ NOW!

Our partnership with GitLab

Adaptavist delivers GitLab services and expertise as a Select GitLab partner through end-to-end DevOps services and solutions. We help you build and implement continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) systems through the latest industry-proven techniques. We make it our mission to maximise the benefits of your IT investment. Our DevOps solutions and services include DevSecOps assessments, GitLab integration and migration, strategic guidance, assessments, coaching and training.

Furthermore, we achieved Professional Services Certified Partner status in GitLab's Channel Services Program. This certification awarded for service delivery excellence strengthens our commitment and capacity to deliver value to our customers.

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Written by

Jobin Kuruvilla

Head of DevOps Practice

Jobin ia a DevOps expert and app developer, with certifications in Atlassian, GitLab PSE, AWS, Kubernetes, and Jenkins. He has led digital transformation initiatives for teams and enterprises and leads the DevOps practice at Adaptavist.

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