What is DevOps?

DevOps evolved out of the combination of web development and systems administration in the cloud era. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications required more complex methods for code management in production and deployment to cloud web servers. The development of container orchestration and elastic web server frameworks have been important in DevOps. Agile project management philosophy is critical in DevOps. Cloud load balancing, web server innovation, and software lifecycle automation are all key tenets of DevOps. Best practices in DevOps are derived from a combination of academic research in computer science, innovation in cloud data center technology, and industrial applications implemented at the world’s largest enterprise companies through software development.

DevOps largely operates through distributed teams of developers working through their desktop computers or laptops to sandboxed code in a testing environment. Developers using version control software push code changes to a sandbox environment where automated code testing is implemented across the commit process. After code changes are tested, they are pushed live to the web servers from the sandbox using version control. In container systems, web servers are provisioned using disk images. The Docker desktop development environment is integrated with version control to publish code to a web server through complete disk image prints that load a full-stack web server into containers. Disk images can be archived on GitHub, GitLab, DockerHub, Quay, or other services for use in automated container orchestration frameworks like Kubernetes.

Version control, CI/CD, knowledge sharing, web server configuration, data center automation, code testing, artifact management, network monitoring, and analytics are all considered to be key elements of DevOps practices used in professional programming and software development teams in enterprise corporations and other complex organizations.

Other approaches to DevOps include Agile project management, ArchOps, Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), DataOps, WebOps, and GitOps. Like business management philosophies, each of these terms has a different emphasis for project management and team organization. Some approaches are based around talent solutions, others are based around hardware and software platforms. The unifying theme is the production and operation of software code in cloud data centers primarily for websites and mobile applications at scale in enterprise corporations.

Most Fortune 500 enterprise corporations have already adopted DevOps methodologies because they are considered an industry best practice. The largest IT companies are leading the advancement of DevOps because in order to optimize the operation of public cloud architecture. DevOps is based on a combination of academic research in computer science and enterprise software development in professional programming teams. DevOps supports the needs of every business for cost savings and increased efficiency in software development and production operations. Many startups are also pioneering the DevOps methodologies in practice to gain competitive advantage or to disrupt existing markets. DevOps adoption is largely driven by the requirements of professional programmers and systems administrators who need to build full-stack solutions on public cloud hosts.

DevOps deployment is increasing in enterprise companies and the centralized or monolithic methods of project management like Spiral and Waterfall are decreasing. The DevOps movement is being led by the proliferation of microservices that complex business organizations need to support. The main concern of both startups and enterprise corporations is to advance software development more quickly with better security. DevOps methodologies allow companies to introduce new code changes in production rapidly or patch security flaws without disrupting existing online services. Companies seek to maximize their return from cloud data center migration with DevOps techniques in deployment of web/mobile applications at scale in support of brands, products, and other services on ecommerce sites or through web publishing requirements in the media industry. Industrial manufacturing companies and telcos adopt DevOps for better cooperation among the members of large programming teams for product and service support.