DevOps has been the buzzword for the last couple of years and enterprises, big and small have slowly started adopting the practice. DevOps is the part of an IT organization’s team responsible for creating and maintaining the infrastructure. It can also be described as a practice that addresses a holistic view of the entire software delivery chain or the product life cycle and considers account shared services, facilitating continuous development, integration and delivery. This is achieved by using a set of tools that automate testing and streamline the development process thereby, enabling collaboration between the software development team and the operations team. DevOps tools enable teams to work more quickly and efficiently. But are these tools enough to foster a collaborative DevOps environment? The answer is no. DevOps is more than just a practice. It requires a change in the organizational culture. It requires a reassessment and re-alignment of how people think about the overall business, their customers as well as the teams.
Conway’s law states that organizations that design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. This means the structure of your software is likely to reflect the structure of your software development organization.
On one hand the development team delivers new code as and when required, the operations team on the other hand maintains the stability by monitoring the changes and the frequency with which the code is deployed.
In order to achieve increased collaboration, there has to be a culture shift, not just within the team, but at an organization level as well.
If the development team works in silos, it is possible that they show some disinterest in the maintenance of a system, if it is solely handled by a different operations team. It would seem as if the development team’s job is to code only and eventually, present it on a platter for the operations team to handle it. The development team can share the responsibility of looking after a system, which will help them to identify ways to simplify deployment and maintenance. This can be achieved through automated deployments and monitoring. They will also get additional insights from monitoring the system in production.
Similarly, when the operations team works closely with the developers, they are able to understand the operational needs of a system in a better way and implement and adopt new automation tools and practices. It is recommended to slowly move on from the traditional process of handover and sign-offs as it discourages people from sharing responsibility. The developers and operations team both, are responsible for the success or failure of a system.
The concept of an autonomous team is that the developers as well as the members from the operations teams should be able to make decisions without following a convoluted decision making process. The teams are able to work in a favorable environment where there is no scope of discrepancies. Instead of waiting for a manual sign off for code to be deployed in testing, you can rely on a version control system which can easily be audited. Without the need of a manual sign-off, the team can automate the deployments and speed up the testing cycle. This would also, ensure that the team builds quality product in the development process. The concept of self-testing code also, allows regular and low-risk deployments.
This aspect is extremely important in order to continuously improve the collaboration between development and operations and to improve the overall system itself. Monitoring how an application or a system behaves in production creates an environment of ownership and takes note of potential improvement areas.
Figure 1 : Dev & Ops Collaboration
Adopting practices that promote continuous integration and continuous delivery is a key enabler of DevOps within organizations. However, organizations have to first build a DevOps team structure that facilitates these practices in order to be successful.
In order to establish a successful DevOps culture, we need to follow the steps mentioned below:
Techbeacon has identified seven different roles that are important for any organization looking to implement DevOps practice.
The DevOps Evangelist
This person promotes the benefits of the DevOps approach by identifying the business benefits that an organization sets to gain by implementing it. He/she is also, responsible for being the change agent who identifies the key roles and gets the development, as well as the operations team on board and ensures that these resources receive the necessary training to make required changes.
Release Manager
This person is responsible for managing and coordinating the lifecycle of the product, from development through production. He/she is also, responsible for creating and managing the end-to-end application delivery tool chain.
Automation Architect
This person is responsible for designing, implementing and analyzing continuous deployment strategies. There is a need to ensure high availability of the application on production and pre-production systems.
Software Developer/Tester
The role of a developer now is quite different from what his/her role was as per the traditional approach. In a DevOps environment, the developer is not just expected to write code but also, responsible for unit testing, deployment and ongoing monitoring of the application.
Experience Assurance Professional
The traditional QA takes on this role in a DevOps environment wherein, the focus of the tester is functionality testing and user experience testing.
Security Engineer
In DevOps environment, the security engineer works in parallel with the developers to ensure that his/her recommendations are taken into consideration much earlier in the process rather than towards the end.
Utility Technology Player
This is a person who can operate effectively across different platforms, tools, networks, servers and databases. The person has expertise in multiple areas, adept at collaborating across disciplines and has the ability to apply knowledge in areas of expertise other than his/her own. These roles can vary depending on the kind of organization and the kind of product that is being built. It is important to have communication and collaboration among the team members in order to deliver a successful product
Even though a team has been setup, an organization should not make hasty decisions with regard to the implementation of DevOps practices. A company’s business goals must be aligned with the team’s setup. The vision of the company must align with the objectives of the DevOps team.
This will instill a sense of purpose in the minds of the team members wherein, they will not just be working on a particular project or task but will have the organization’s business objectives in mind while implementing their strategies.
Organizations that are looking to implement DevOps and trying to achieve continuous integration and delivery through automated testing and continuous deployment have a plethora of automation tools available in the market. It is extremely important to identify the set of tools that align with your setup and your team structure.
There should be key performance indicators in place to closely monitor the effectiveness of the team structure, roles and the tools selected. Some examples of performance indicators could be : measuring the number of deployments happening per day, whether the security or quality standards are being met or not, the volume of errors and bugs reported and how efficiently they are being handled.
In earlier days, successful deployment of applications was a lengthy process. Once the code had been checked in to the code repository, the developers themselves used to build the deliverable in their local system and then the package was shared with the operations team. For operations team to deploy a package, a service request/ change request would have to be initiated in the change management system, and then requests for approvals were sent to the business, operations, etc. Once all approvals were in place, the operations team would validate the package and schedule deployment for the next day. The package was shared via a shared location such as FTP. During the deployment, someone from development team had to be available to assist in case any issues came up during deployment. The development/ QA team then had to verify the deployment and inform the stakeholders about the successful deployment. The entire process was time consuming and the chances of occurrence of errors were too high
Below is a summary of the limitations of the existing process:
1. Development team creating the build
2. Creating ticket for operations team
3. Assistance during deployment
4. QA – limited control
DevOps (Development and Operations) evolved to overcome the limitations of the above process and to speed up the overall delivery time. One of the key factors for the quick adoption of the DevOps strategy is the emergence of Agile development methodology which required deployment of production ready code in every 2 weeks.
The term DevOps means “Development and Operations” i.e. both development and operations happen simultaneously, instead of happening is silos. The key features of DevOps are Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI / CD).
Continuous Integration means that the completed and unit tested code is integrated to the repository continuously, while verifying the quality and completeness of the integrated code by performing build, test case execution, code quality analysis, etc. Continuous Delivery means that the merged code is continuously deployed to the environment automatically at pre-defined periods. The CI/CD pipelines ensure that quality code is available in the repository all the time and that the latest available code is deployed to the testing environment. The branching and merging strategy can also, be integrated with the DevOps strategy so that the merging of code to higher environments can be performed via the continuous integration tools itself.
Following are the key steps for implementing a DevOps process:
For implementing the DevOps process, first the whole team (Development, QA, Product Owner and Scrum Master) discusses and finalizes a branching strategy. The branching strategy and the environments are closely coupled and can be mapped to each other respectively, in most cases. The basic branching strategy for a typical project consists of three branches: Develop, Release, and Master.
All development activities take place in this branch. Ideally, a separate branch will have to be created for each user story and it needs to be reviewed when merged to Develop branch.
This is the branch where the testing/QA is performed. A versioning strategy is followed to name the tags in the Release branch. Semantic versioning is the commonly used versioning convention. Once the changes are merged to Release branch, a tagged version is created which will be used for further deployment and testing.
Once the code is deployed to production, it is merged from the tagged release branch to the Master branch.
Figure 2 : Defining a Branching Strategy
The environments usually, complement the branches. Corresponding to each branch, there will be an environment where it will be deployed.
Applications are deployed from the Develop branch. In some scenarios, the developers’ local machine is considered as the development environment and a named server based environment is used as an integration environment, where all the different components can be integrated and tested. In both cases, the code from Develop branch is used.
The versioned application from the Release branch is deployed here. The QA team performs testing in this environment.
The code once merged to Master branch is the production code. The production environment always runs the application in the latest Master branch.
There can be other environments, depending on the need, like staging environment, performance test environment etc. that can have different branches or can connect to existing branches.
Figure 3 : Defining the Environments
Jenkins is the most popular and commonly used continuous integration tool across industry. It can integrate with multiple source repositories like Git, SVN, etc and also, has plugins for integrating with variety of systems/tools. Jenkins can be installed in a standalone machine or can be installed on cloud instance. Alternatively, there are Jenkins services available which can be directly used as containers where in Jenkins image can be deployed.
Once installed, the Jenkins UI can be accessed over the browser and all the configurations can be performed via the UI.
There are many different ways to configure Jenkins to perform continuous integration. Below are some of the key methods:
Below are the key steps for performing continuous integration.
Jenkins can be configured to deploy applications to servers directly such as weblogic or can also, be configured to deploy to cloud-based instances [Azure, AWS].
Branch management is an optional feature of DevOps. It helps to avoid issues like developer directly committing code to QA/ Release branches for fixing bugs identified in QA, thereby, introducing more bugs. Branch management via DevOps will allow much better process and help to avoid bugs related to commit, merge, etc.
A simple branch management process is described below:
Developer creates branch for his own user story.
Following are the advantages of using this approach.
An organization will face many challenges while building a DevOps team structure. There can be problems related to collaboration and communication or with building assets that can be reused within the organization across different projects. An approach that has been suggested by the experts in the industry is building a Centre of Enablement, which basically defines the way in which teams should be organized and processes should be followed.
There is a lot to gain from implementing a DevOps strategy and team structure in the long run. A good start for any organization would be to bring in more collaboration across different functions and a sense of shared responsibility in order to derive more quality in our deliverables.