by Ed DiGregory
October 31, 2018
DevOps has become, like so many other industry terms and methods, quite ubiquitous in recent years. It’s thrown around so much that its true meaning is often misunderstood, or lost altogether. Defining the DevOps methodology is the first step in understanding how it works to better development efforts — from design to customer support.
As its name suggests, DevOps is the merging of the development and operations areas of your business. Bringing these two disparate departments under one umbrella. DevOps seeks to combat these two sides operating within their own vacuum. DevOps is recognizing that each of these sides does more harm than good when not in constant communication with the other.
Again, DevOps it is not a catch-all term, but rather describes the symbiotic relationship between development and operations working through a project’s entire lifecycle. When we say the entire lifecycle, we mean the entire lifecycle. From product design, through its actual development, and even through to production and user support. Nailing down what DevOps looks like is unique to every company.
While the development aspect is self-explanatory, the operations portion can be a bit vague. The “Ops” in DevOps might refer to system admins, general operations staff, engineers, or whoever else isn’t involved strictly in the development side of things.
We’ve talked a lot about the Agile Software Development Strategy on the blog before. If DevOps sounds similar, you’re not imagining things. In some ways, DevOps was born out of Agile. The latter requires constant communication and close collaboration between developers, product managers and customers to inform a better development process and overall product. These principals certainly carry over to the DevOps methodology, but add a greater importance on how the final service or product is delivered.
In other words, DevOps can be seen as an extension to the Agile system you’ve already put in place, yet extends further than the development and maintenance of a project. However, like Agile, DevOps can be difficult to put into words or explain to your company. At the end of the day, DevOps is going to look different everywhere it’s used. To better understand the DevOps methodology, we’ll explore what DevOps is not in a future blog post. Stay tuned!
At Aspirant, we are experts in helping you understand the DevOps methodology. If your company is looking to adopt the DevOps way of software development, explore our our app development and integration capabilities or let us know how we can help below!