Chapter 1. Introduction to DevOps

In the traditional approach to application development and maintenance, multiple stakeholders, departments, groups, and vendors are involved in the overall software development life cycle (SDLC). Most of us are familiar with the stages of application life cycle management: the business requirements are gathered by a business analyst, then developed by the development team (or could have been outsourced), and tested by QA teams (also could have been outsourced) for functionality and fitness for purpose. Performance and stress testing were also performed in applicable scenarios, by appropriate groups with relevant tools. Then the production deployment process, with a checklist and approvals, was managed by the IT teams at the organization, followed by monitoring and support by maintenance teams. And we notice that each stage of the maturity cycle, from functionality development to usability and maintenance, is managed in silos, by independent teams, departments, processes, and tools. This approach is often fragmented by techniques, frameworks, processes, people, and tools impacting the final product in terms of features, cost, schedule, quality, performance, and other administrative overheads such as interfacing and integration between vendors. Also, in this method the maintenance, support costs, and skill needs are often overlooked. However, both from application life cycle and business points of view, maintenance and support activities are key and important to assess, evaluate, and estimate well in advance.

In this lesson, we will cover the following topics:

• Introduction to DevOps
• Business application of DevOps.
• Business drivers/market trends
• DevOps strategy
• Benefits of DevOps

Many technological innovations have taken place to challenge the traditional method of IT management in almost every segment. The technological advances and changes are quite profound, rapid, and often intermingled, encompassing multiple fields such as agile methodology, DevOps, big data, cloud, and so on. A comprehensive and holistic approach will undoubtedly be rewarding and derive maximum value for organizations. Many institutions have already embarked on this journey towards the future, adopting these technologies.

The pre-DevOps software development challenges are reluctant to change in systems; deployments fraught with risk, lack of consistency across environments (it works on my machine syndrome), the impact of silos--toss problems across the wall such as teams resulting in duplication of effort, skill sets, and in-fighting. To mitigate the mentioned issues and bridge this gap DevOps emerged as a popular choice.

DevOps (Development plus Operations) has recently taken center stage in the SDLC. DevOps offers process frameworks augmented with open source tools to integrate all the phases of the application life cycle, and ensure they function as a cohesive unit. It helps to align and automate the process across the phases of development, testing, deployment, and support. It includes best practices such as code repositories, build automation, continuous deployment, and others.

DevOps adoption for systems including big data systems and projects is a cultural shift compared to traditional development cycles. The purpose of this book is to put forth the concepts and adoption strategy for an organization, covering the technology areas of DevOps, big data, cloud, data science, in-memory technology, and others. Adopting and adhering to DevOps practices will be rewarding for any organization and allow it to improve on its performance and efficiency.

Acceptance of open source tools for each segment of IT functionality, their popularity, and versatility, is increasing day by day, across the world. As a matter of fact, many new tool variants have been introduced to the market for each segment. The open source tools for DevOps are major contributors to the success of DevOps' adoption in the market by institutions, which is discussed in detail in coming sections.

As we can see, across industries DevOps adoption has seen steady growth year on year:

DevOps penetration in enterprises shows a healthy trend, as per the following figure: