DevOps

Even as DevOps adoption continues to accelerate in both large enterprises and web-native organizations, confusion lingers about what exactly the term means. Is DevOps a culture, a movement, an approach, a philosophy, or some amalgam of several of these things? Or does DevOps mean different things to different people? DevOps is a set of practices that works to automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams, so they can build, test, and release software faster and more reliably. The term DevOps was formed by combining the words “development” and “operations” and signifies a cultural shift that bridges the gap between development and operation teams, which historically functioned in siloes. At its essence, DevOps is a culture, a movement, a philosophy. It’s a firm handshake between development and operations that emphasizes a shift in mindset, better collaboration, and tighter integration. It unites agile, git, continuous delivery, automation, and much more, to help development and operations teams be more efficient, innovate faster, and deliver higher value to businesses and customers.

Azure DevOps (in the past known as VSTS) is a Software as a service (SaaS) platform from Microsoft that provides an end-to-end DevOps toolchain for developing and deploying software. It offers a framework all that you need to assemble your product from start to finish. Azure DevOps integrates with most leading tools on the market and offers a single platform for software developer teams to design ventures utilizing the Agile process, oversee code utilizing Git, test the application, and deploy code using using the CI/CD framework. So, it is a great option for orchestrating a DevOps toolchain.

Through our DevOps practices, we ensure faster and regular product updates offering a customer-friendly approach and redefining software delivery: 

• Continuous Integration
  Through this practice, we promise early problem detection, faster recovery from failures, quality assurance and less turn-around time before the product is released. It is a great way to avoid last-minute issues and helps in leveraging feedback instantaneously.
• Continuous Delivery
  We take this engineering approach to ensure software update releases in a phased and reliable manner. Through our service, we aim to reduce deployment risks and initiate the deployment process with accuracy. This helps bring down the new release timeframe, improve product quality and work on bugs in a timely manner.
• Microservices
  Through this, we offer a toolset to address any configuration or scripting issues that ensure effective deployment and scaling.
• Infrastructure as a Code
  We offer enhanced resource management through optimally priced implementation and real-time deployments. We aim to achieve improved consistency and also offer quality resource management through a variety of options.
• Configuration Management
  We offer code management and platform automation services which enable instant configuration, establishes a single tool to manage all operations, improve code quality and timely activity report management.
• Policy as a Code
  Codification of infrastructure and its relevant configurations with the cloud helps firms monitor, track, validate and reconfigure infrastructure in an automated procedure. In a cloud environment, this helps you control resources while monitoring their security and ensure compliance.

Azure DevOps comprises a range of services covering the full development life-cycle. At the time of writing these are:

• Azure Boards: Agile planning, work item tracking, visualization and reporting tool.
• Azure Pipelines: A language, platform and cloud agnostic CI/CD platform with support for containers or Kubernetes.
• Azure Repos: Provides cloud-hosted private git repos.
• Azure Artifacts: Provides integrated package management with support for Maven, npm, Python and NuGet package feeds from public or private sources.
• Azure Test Plans: Provides an integrated planned and exploratory testing solution.

Azure DevOps can also be used to orchestrate third-party tools.

How can a business organization move ahead in the competitive market and become more efficient in delivering the best features to the end-users in the set time? Well, here are some of the prime benefits a company can enjoy after adopting the DevOps way of working: 

• Ensure faster deployment
  Faster and more frequent delivery of updates and features will not only satisfy the customers but will also help your company take a firm stand in a competitive market.
• Stabilize work environment
  Do you know that the tension involved in the release of new features and fixes or updates can topple the stability of your workspace and decreases the overall productivity? Improve your work environment with a steady and well-balanced approach of operation with DevOps practice.
• Significant improvement in product quality
  Collaboration between development and operation teams and frequent capturing of user feedback leads to a significant improvement in the quality of the product.
• Automation in repetitive tasks leaves more room for innovation
  DevOps has greater benefits when compared to the traditional model as it helps in detecting and correcting problems quickly and efficiently. As the flaws are repeatedly tested through automation, the team gets more time in framing new ideas.
• Promotes agility in your business
  It’s no secret that making your business agile can help you to stay ahead in the market. Thanks to DevOps, it is now possible to obtain the scalability required to transform the business.
• Continuous delivery of software
  In DevOps methodology, all of the departments are responsible for maintaining stability and offering new features. Therefore, the speed of software delivery is fast and undisturbed, unlike the traditional method.
• Fast and reliable problem-solving techniques
  Ensuring quick and stable solution to technical errors in software management is one of the primary benefits of DevOps.
• Transparency leads to high productivity
  With the elimination of silo(ing) and promotion of collaboration, this process allows for easy communication among the team members, making them more focused in their specialised field. Therefore, incorporating DevOps practises has also led to an upsurge in productivity and efficiency among the employees of a company.
• Minimal cost of production
  With proper collaboration, DevOps helps in cutting down the management and production costs of your departments, as both maintenance and new updates are brought under a broader single umbrella.