In the
current market scenario, DevOps, a term which can be described as a mix of
Development and Operations, isn’t exactly unheard of in the world of Software Development (It’s
been around for 7 years). It can be
described as an approach that lays
stress on collaboration between the development and operations wings of an
organization, adopted to optimize the
delivery of software and also improving the production cycle rate.
As a term it
was coined by Patrick Deboise, a system administrator, during the “DevOpsDays”
events organized by him in Belgium in 2009. In the same year, John Allspaw’s
made a presentation on “10+ Deploys per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation” at the Velocity 2009 conference. Eric Ries’ work “The Lean Startup”, the
451 Group’s report “The Rise of DevOps” in 2010 and various other mentions
eventually made this methodology popular. This approach emphasizes closer
cooperation between the Development and Operations departments. Though it bears
some semblance to the Agile Software
Development model, they are not the same. The usage of DevOps will help an
organization to produce higher quality software faster. Automation plays a
major role in DevOps, and this, aids in the target of faster delivery of the
product, as well as ensuring its quality.
Through this
method of cooperation, an organization gains continous, faster delivery of
products or services. DevOps can also be considered not just as an approach but
also a movement which can have various attributes such as a culture, an
emphasis on automation, which is a necessary pre-requisite to obtain an
immediate response and ways to share new, innovative thinking and strategies. It can be seen as an improvement to the
existing agile methodology of software development. One result was that the
operations unit of a technological organization functioned as a seperate unit
while the programming,testing along with the business units were brought in
line. In DevOps, with its increased focus on operations, Agile methods are to
be applied on this unit.
DevOps has
grown popular as a result of the software industry’s frustration with the
existing software delivery process which are becoming expensive with errors
being part of the process. This unproductivity has led to its adoption. Apart
from its collaborative aspect, DevOps also depends on continuous feedback for
better quality of products at every stage of software development. Automation
in product builds and testing are more emphasized than ever. Technologies such
as cloud and development on the mobile platform are also well-known for
adopting this approach.
RedHat in its
whitepaper “Accelerate Your Business with DevOps” by Gordon Haff has made a
thrust for the adoption of DevOps, ‘citing the speed and flexibility with which
new features are delivered’. The
whitepaper talks of DevOps as instilling a “culture of collaboration”,
automation for accelerating application delivery and the building of a dynamic
software platform. The whitepaper also stresses on the aspect of automation as
well .
Red Hat also,
as part of its focus on DevOps, offers a RHCA certification based on it namely
Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA): DevOps, with Red Hat Certified Engineer
(RHCE) or Red Hat Certified Developer as necessary prerequisites. Red Hat’s
website defines it as someone “who has attained Red Hat’s highest level of
certification, proving their skills and knowledge in technologies and practices
that can accelerate the process of moving applications and updates from
development through the build and test processes and on to production”.
About Author:
Mr. Thomas
Mathew is an IT professional with MSc IT from Amritha School of Arts &
Science Cochin. He has a deep passion in system administration. Mr. Thomas is
very active in technical forums and blog and love sharing information and views in the media. At present he is doing RHCE (Fast Track) from IPSR.
