DevOps is a software engineering culture that collaboratively integrates development and operations teams. Its main objective is to improve the efficiency and quality of the development process through practices such as process automation, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), testing, and monitoring.
It aims to eliminate barriers and silos between teams. Therefore, it makes no distinction between departments, but rather promotes the collaboration and integration of all team members into a more agile and efficient software development process.
Keep reading to understand everything about the subject!
What is required to implement DevOps?
Using DevOps in a company generally requires significant cultural changes. Beyond the use of a methodology or a set of tools, a philosophy that emphasizes collaboration, communication, automation, and continuous improvement is also necessary.
This demands transformations in the mindset and behavior of development and operations teams, as well as in the organizational culture as a whole. Some of the points necessary to implement DevOps are:
Breaking down barriers
For processes to occur more agilely, everyone needs to be integrated. To achieve this, it is necessary to break down the barriers between development and operations teams, promoting collaboration and communication actions.
Added value
Customers are increasingly demanding in their search for solutions to their needs. Meanwhile, the technology market is becoming more competitive.
Therefore, to meet these needs assertively, it is necessary to establish a mindset focused onadding value for the customer, which goes beyond simply delivering the software.
Standardization and efficiency
Promoting the automation and standardization of processes is another necessary change with DevOps. This makes it possible to increase efficiency and reduce human errors. This is where the pursuit of improvingbusiness performance comes into play, as well as its responsiveness.
Continuous innovation
Another important factor is encouragingexperimentation and continuous innovation. In other words, establishing a culture of learning and improvement.
What are the benefits of DevOps?
To successfully implement DevOps in a company, it is important toinvolve the entire organization, from top management to development and operations teams. In the case of transitioning from a more traditional model, the benefits include:
- Improvement insoftware quality and reliability, with automated testing and code analysis;
- Greaterefficiency and productivity, by automating repetitive tasks;
- Faster and more frequentsoftware delivery through collaboration;
- Cost reduction promoted through automation and improvements.
How was the cultural shift at Teclógica?
Teclógica began using DevOps around 2015, when we realized that our development team and our customers needed adelivery process that kept pace with our growth.
There was a reliance on individuals executing a series of manual processes and procedures, depending on specific knowledge for anything to be delivered to environments, whether in development or production.
To improve this, we started using DevOps practices and CI/CD tools, such asJenkins – an open-source automation server, to automate as much of these processes as possible, aiming atour development lifecycle from the creation of project branches to the delivery of the solution.
We made great progress in this regard, and we continue to evolve because we believe in continuous improvement, with theconstant evolution of tools. Over time, contributions from the team itself helped refine and polish the processes.
Back in 2019, we migrated from the Jenkins tool toGitLab, which had features better suited to our evolution and growth needs. Furthermore, it was important to centralize development tools and make the process more structured, integrated, and transparent, reducing the possibility of human error.
Jenkins served our CI/CD needs very well, but GitLab, besides perfectly meeting the same demands, allowed us toautomatically link and track all development tasks.
How is DevOps practiced at the company today?
Currently, GitLab is the primary development tool at Teclógica, where we log all issues involving products, from improvements to program bugs, allowing us totrack the entire workflow until resolution.
Source code changes can be easily observed through the traceability provided by the tool, which are grouped into a milestone to be pushed to production via a release.
This creates a process that organizes a series of complexities more transparently, becoming essential for the proper functioning of DevOps.
Having our products in the cloud on Google Cloud since 2016, around 2020 we began usingGoogle Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which is simply a container service orchestration tool to deploy applications. This practice directly contributed to the availability, elasticity, and resiliency of the applications.
Another important innovation was the adoption of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which meanskeeping infrastructure procedures, such as machine and resource creation, in source code.
This means that to rebuild machines and services, one simply executes scripts without much need for human intervention,significantly reducing the risk of failures in this process, especially in extremely complex environments.
Furthermore, IaC ensures that everything is documented and version-controlled, facilitatingthe traceability of changes. This also makes it easier to execute fallback processes, which is very labor-intensive in traditional infrastructure models.
Conclusion
After all these evolution cycles, we can conclude that DevOps is no longer a recommendation and has become a necessity for anyone working with software development, supporting the agile, continuous, and organized evolution of applications.
DevOps has no ready-made recipe: every company needs toimplement a process tailored to its reality and its needs. It should be viewed as an evolving process, as market tools and business needs change, generating opportunities to adopt better practices and solutions.
This process is also an instrument to provideincreased customer satisfaction, contributing to the stability and reliability of using the solutions. Did you enjoy this content? Then keep following Teclógica’s blog.
*This article was produced by the Teclógica team: Sílvio Etges, Product Manager; João Batista Gianisini Junior, Software Architect, and Igor Thiago Balsanelli Martins, Infrastructure Analyst.
