DevOps software engineering encompasses various steps, skills, and techniques to successfully launch a software product or service. It includes everything from planning to releasing and everything in between. A DevOps team is made up of engineers and software developers, as the merge of the words “development” and “operations” in the term “DevOps” implies.
This process has several steps that need to be taken by each of the teams and both together. Those steps are planning, coding, testing, releasing, deploying, operating, and monitoring. While these steps go in this order, the reality is that there is no starting or ending point—it’s a continuous process.
Here are some of the things that make up DevOps.
Software Development
One of the major parts of the DevOps process is software development. This is when developers work together to write code for a specific product. Software development includes steps like planning, coding, testing, and releasing software code. They create what the customers will use and should be determined to get rid of any bugs in the code in order to deliver a perfect product to the customer. The software development team will regularly meet to discuss their progress and any improvements that can be made to the software product.
Operations
The second part of DevOps refers to operations, which is composed of operations staff, system engineers, database and system administrators, network engineers, among other key players in the software development process. They will take care of the deployment of the software that the developers produced. Their interaction with the development team will be frequent as well as constructive and communicative.
Tools
There are several sets of tools that DevOps teams will use to expedite the development process. These include code repositories that enable developers to collaborate with their code and keep track of their versions. Additionally, DevOps teams use continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipeline engines to validate and deliver apps to end-users with automation. They also use cloud environments to scale their project and manage other tasks related to the development process.
Moreover, they use “as-a-service” models to enable collaboration between the development team and the IT team. Lastly, they will use monitoring tools to allow DevOps teams to observe the performance of code releases and the levels of security in their infrastructures and networks. They will often combine monitoring and analytical tools to acquire operational intel on the changes and effects on the overall development environment.
Skills
Another aspect of DevOps is the skills used by the teams involved. These skills can include but are not limited to infrastructure configurations, coding, cloud, testing, software security, scripting, and strong communication. Other more specific skills include version control configuration management, analytics, and code maintenance.
Some job titles that can be found in DevOps businesses include full-stack developer, automation specialist, site reliability engineer, and infrastructure engineer, among others. They usually require a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering or science or any other related field. Higher paying positions may require more advanced degrees such as system architecture or software design.
Microservices
Microservices are a novel manner of producing applications that are divided into smaller and independent services. In DevOps, microservices offer benefits such as increased agility due to the shorter build and deploy cycles. It also offers reliability as any bugs or errors will affect the microservice and not the entire software system. Scalability is also offered with microservices as they can easily be upgraded on their own by using clusters or pools. Lastly, microservices can help with product management as the development efforts can be equally divided among a team of developers and engineers.
