What is DevOps and how it helps development?

Artyom Dovgopol

DevOps is like a great orchestra: each musician is virtuosic, but success comes only when all instruments play in harmony 😉

Key takeaways 👌

Introduction

Waiters and chefs do communicate a lot in every restaurant, even if they don’t really like it. Why? Because it’s crucial for the functionality of the entire kitchen. Replace waiters with the operations department and chefs with developers, and you’ve got yourself an average team that often struggles to convey their wishes and recommendations to each other. 

DevOps bridges the gap between development and operations, using automotive processes and continuous feedback to create an efficient and productive working environment.

DevOps can be compared to a modern construction company. Unlike architects or engineers, it stays with the site manager until the residents move in, ensuring that everything is working and is as comfortable as can be.

The result? A building that is high-quality not only on schematics and plans, but in reality as well.

Key DevOps principles

DevOps is built on numerous doctrines that you must understand to successfully introduce this philosophy into your project. Some of them are tricky to understand, though, so let’s take a look:

• Continuous Integration (CI)

Imagine a school project’s Google-doc, where each member of a group updates the document in real time. CI is exactly that – a huge code repository that’s being updated daily.  No more mashing different parts of code and wondering why it’s not working – all the errors are spotted early on using automated tests and a flagging system, ensuring that the result is at the very least functioning.

• Continuous Delivery (CD)

Usually, pre-release inspections are a huge pain in the back that adds a couple more months to the release date. The CD principle is all about preventing that, using autonomous tests that ensure that the code is always ready for deployment. 

• Automation

Testing, deployment, and sometimes even building of a code must be as automated as possible, allowing team members to create value, instead of performing routine operations. This especially affects various critical procedures, where human error can ruin months of hard work.

Tools and practices

Modern DevOps stack includes numerous instruments, each being crucial for the development process and successful release. It might be hard to pinpoint the most important ones, but we’re here to help:

• Git – for efficient control of different versions, allowing teams to track changes and work on the same code as a united force.

How does it work: Each member creates a bit of code, which is then stored as a so-called "commit" (a saved change). All commits are linked within a single history tree, allowing for a seamless integration of new bits of code while maintaining a clear record of changes.

• Docker – for containerization, allowing developers to test different bits of code (or whole apps for that matter) without worrying about dependencies.

How does it work: The developer can place the test subject inside a Docker container – an isolated environment that includes everything the application needs to run. This ensures consistency across different systems and allows tests to be conducted safely, without the risk of affecting the entire server.

• Kubernetes – for managing containerized applications, ensuring seamless deployment and overall stability.

How does it work: So application run inside containers using Docker, right? Kubernetes organizes these containers into pods – sort of deployable units, and scales the entire deployment process based on priority and demand.

• Prometheus – for proper monitoring of system metrics, ensuring stable source of insights and useful data about application’s overall state.

How does it work: Like a warden, Prometheus constantly asks all the smaller monitoring systems, “is something wrong?”, “are we doing okay?” and stores their answers in a separate time-series database.

• Grafana – for a convenient way to view all the data collected by monitoring systems (including our guy Prometheus). 

How does it work: Grafana displays all the technical mumbo jumbo received from Prometheus and other analysis systems as graphs, charts, and tables for easy access and understanding.

• ELK Stack – for centralized analysis, making it easier to work with large quantities of data received from an application.

How does it work: ELK Stack is actually a trio: Elasticsearch, used for storing logs from various monitoring systems, Logstash, used for processing of said logs, and Kibana, responsible for packing the results of her two friends into user-friendly dashboards.

Business benefits

And in case you missed the point of how exactly useful DevOps can be to your project, let’s go through some key benefits to make sure we’re on the same page:

• Faster development and release
• High stability after release
• Increasingly reduced maintenance and update costs
• Overall better quality of the product

And a bit more about efficiency...

Learn more about improving performance in our article How to improve JavaScript performance: Tips and recommendations

Conclusion

DevOps is not just a fancy word, but a reliable and proven approach to ensuring the quality of a product. Some changes will have to be made to the development process, sure, but the results are absolutely worth it: fast releases, satisfied users, and high team morale.

Our team at Toimi knows DevOps practices all too well – we practice them in every project, allowing us to create truly reliable products.