Nearly since its inception, the makers of software have sought better ways to build systems. At a constant rate, new technologies and approaches to build more robust and scalable systems emerge, become adopted, and are discarded as new strategies emerge. We learn important lessons of what didn’t work, or work as well as expected, and apply those principles to new projects. Some important examples of the recent past include:
- Effectively modeling the function and purpose of a program in its code
- Taking advantage of automation technology to continuously test applications upon committing new logic or in preparation of deployment
- Allowing teams to take on responsibility for the entire lifecycle of their application
- Architecting applications for high availability to improve uptime and performance
- Adopting virtualization, cloud platforms, and containers to better manage application delivery, scaling, isolation, and security
If Microservices can be called “an attempt to build better software,” then DevOps represents the practices and tools that we have created to help us build them. Microservices did not give birth to DevOps, likewise, DevOps did not completely cause Microservice architectures to gain in popularity. Both emerged piece by piece from real-world challenges and clever solutions.
They are continually adapting as we learn new and better ways to effectively build software. Taken together, domain driven design, continuous integration and testing, shifts toward DevOps philosophies and practices have radically changed how we build and deliver software. As we get the convergence of everything, there have been a few profound benefits including: increased speed of software development, more rapid delivery to customers, improved scale, better collaboration, and enhanced security.
DevOps Practices – Test Everything
DevOps represents the practices and tools that we have created to help us build them. It continually adapts as we learn new and better ways to effectively build software. One of the central tenets of DevOps is “test everything.” Continuous integration takes the automation of tests to the next level. It integrates suites of tests into “pipelines” that can be executed when developers merge and commit their code to a central repository. Such pipelines allow for the state of a software project to be monitored continuously, with the goal of finding and addressing bugs more quickly so that software can be validated and released more frequently.
Continuous delivery couples the testing to pipelines which can automatically build and prepare the software for deployment to a staging or production environment. When continuous delivery functions as intended, developers and operations will have software builds that have gone through a rigorous testing process and is ready for deployment. Using such systems, companies such as Etsy have reported being able to update their production environments fifty times per day (or more).
Build a DevOps Culture Within Your Organization
If you want to keep your company on the cutting-edge, DevOps is crucial. Our DevOps engineering approach can help your business deliver faster and more efficiently. Contact us to learn more about our DevOps engineering and how DVO Consulting can be your strategic partner.