DevOps is the ultimate game-changer in software development, revolutionizing the way teams work together to deliver high-quality applications. By integrating and automating software development and IT operations, DevOps enables faster time-to-market, improved collaboration, and reduced risks.

According to expert Neal Ford, DevOps leverages the "Bring the pain forward" principle, tackling complex tasks early on to foster automation and swift issue detection. This approach not only streamlines the development process but also ensures high-quality software that meets user expectations.

At its core, DevOps is characterized by three key principles: shared ownership, workflow automation, and rapid feedback. These principles are designed to reduce the time between committing code changes and deploying them into production, while maintaining exceptional quality.

History

The concept of combining software development methodologies with deployment and operations concepts dates back to the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, it wasn't until 2009 that the first DevOps Days conference was held in Ghent, Belgium, founded by Belgian consultant Patrick Debois.

Since then, the DevOps movement has gained momentum, with reports such as the "State of DevOps" publication highlighting the accelerating adoption rate. The report also introduced key metrics like deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and change failure rate to measure software development efficiency and reliability.

Relevant Metrics

DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) has developed a set of metrics to gauge software development efficiency and reliability. These metrics include:

  • Deployment Frequency: Time between code deployments
  • Mean Lead Time for Changes: Time between code commit and deployment
  • Change Failure Rate: Percentage of deployments causing production issues
  • Failed Deployment Recovery Time: Time taken to recover from failed deployments
  • Reliability: Measures operational performance, focusing on availability and user expectations

Relationship to Other Approaches

DevOps draws inspiration from other well-known practices such as Lean, Deming's Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, The Toyota Way, and Agile. Unlike rigid frameworks like ITIL, DevOps is a flexible and bottom-up approach that prioritizes collaboration and automation.

Platform Engineering

Platform engineering is an emerging discipline that supports DevOps by building and maintaining internal developer platforms (IDPs). These platforms provide standardized tools and reusable components to streamline software delivery and reduce cognitive load on developers.

Agile

Agile development teams have long recognized the importance of automating operations and infrastructure functions. As a result, the motivations for modern DevOps practices such as automated build and test, continuous integration, and continuous delivery originated in the Agile world.

ArchOps

ArchOps presents an extension to DevOps practice, starting from software architecture artifacts instead of source code, for operation deployment. This approach recognizes architectural models as first-class entities in software development, deployment, and operations.

Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD)

Automation is a core principle for achieving DevOps success, and CI/CD is a critical component. By automating the build, test, and deployment process, teams can achieve faster time-to-market with reduced risks.

Database DevOps

Database DevOps applies DevOps and CI/CD principles directly to database development and operations. This approach integrates schema changes, migrations, reference data, and other data-layer updates into the same version-controlled and automated pipeline.