DevOps is a cultural and professional movement that involves a combination of software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) philosophies, practices, and tools. The main goal of DevOps is to empower organisations to develop, deliver, and improve their software at a faster rate. This is accomplished through close collaboration between software developers and IT operations professionals. The DevOps model is complementary to the Agile software development approach, which you can learn more about through an Agile course in Singapore.

When a company adopts a DevOps model, operations and development teams are not siloed, as they are with some traditional IT management models, but instead integrated. The teams thereby cooperate throughout the application lifecycle, which allows for greater flexibility. At times, quality assurance and cybersecurity professionals can enter the fold as well.

Often, the teams can deliver value faster, as they can automate tedious or slow processes. Through the use of technology stacks and tooling, the professionals can carry out operations or changes conveniently, without requiring external help from other teams.

DevOps best practices

A transition to a DevOps model requires a fundamental shift in organisational culture. It requires engineers in either team to make concerted efforts to engage with each other to optimise their processes. They also need to take ownership of their services, even going so far as to perform beyond their traditional scope of work. Only then can the customer’s needs be addressed most rapidly and effectively.

The path to the integration of these two traditionally siloed teams will be different for most organisations. However, there are some central best practices that can kickstart an organisation’s journey to streamlined software development and IT management processes. Here are just a few of them:

• Small and frequent updates: With small, incremental updates, each deployment becomes far less risky. It allows teams to identify bugs that may have caused errors in the previous deployment, and rapidly address them in the next update. This allows for faster innovation as well.
• Microservices: The microservices architecture refers to dividing a single application into a set of smaller, simpler services. Each service performs a single function and is operated independently of the other services. Small teams can then take charge of each service, reducing the amount of coordination needed for software updates.
• Continuous integration: This is a practice where software developers merge their code changes in a central repository. They can then run automated tests and builds with the consolidated changes, helping them to discover and fix bugs more rapidly. It also hastens the process of validation and releasing of updates.
• Continuous delivery: This practice builds on continuous integration, where the compiled code changes are automatically deployed onto a testing or production environment. Thus, developers can ensure that they will have a rigorously tested product before release.

Benefits of DevOps

Upon adopting the DevOps model, organisations can expect to see numerous benefits, both in terms of internal operations and external consumer engagement.

• Faster processes: With an increased rate of updates, organisations can adapt to the constantly changing market better. They can also improve and address bugs faster, iwhich will improve customer satisfaction.
• Scale: Even with complex systems, DevOps practices help organisations manage their development, testing, and deployment processes efficiently.
• Improved collaboration: The DevOps culture requires that software developers and IT operations professionals work together closely. By sharing their knowledge and merging workflows, the organisation minimises the issues that come with siloed teams.

DevOps Foundation Course

If you are interested in learning how to implement DevOps principles in your organisation, you can consider attending the DevOps Foundation course. This course was designed by the DevOps Institute (DOI) to impart and test knowledge of the vocabulary, principles, and practices of DevOps. By the end of the course, participants would be able to apply the concepts learnt to improve the integration of their software development and IT operations teams.

We offer the DevOps Foundation course, among a suite of IT management and project management training courses. To further your knowledge of complementary frameworks, you can also have a look at the many other Agile certification courses that we provide, such as the Agile Project Management Essentials course and the Agile Software courses. Any IT professional can upgrade themselves with our highly relevant training courses.