What is DevOps?

Today, IT is about delivering personalized experiences fast, and without breaking the bank. So why do 91% of leaders find operational challenges a real buzzkill for innovation and team productivity?

Here’s the good news — modern DevOps best practices within a proper application lifecycle management (ALM) strategy provide your teams with the tools and know-how to quickly and securely launch new features and capabilities into the market.

So what is DevOps and how does it work?

DevOps is a combination of “development” (Dev) and “operations” (Ops), with the goal of speeding up the software development lifecycle through a set of automated tools and integration practices.

The DevOps process builds a collaborative culture between technology and people, providing reliable products, features, fixes, and updates at a rapid pace.

Agile is a common project management methodology that allows teams to respond to feedback and execute iterations in a timely and collaborative manner. DevOps extends Agile principles to the software development process, emphasizing a structure that breaks development into clear phases with a strong focus on continuous improvement.

When your organization adopts DevOps tools, you will experience increased collaboration between teams, more efficient feedback loops, and quicker updates. With a culture of continuous monitoring and improvement with DevOps, your team can better adapt to market changes and deliver more valuable customer experiences.

The unique aspect of a DevOps team is the team itself. The collective ownership – which includes the product manager, engineers, and business administrator – orchestrates the entire software development lifecycle, from development to deployment. This approach allows teams to develop a broader range of skills, enabling them to better address the challenges of a complex application lifecycle.

In particular, teams that utilize DevOps practices can automate and simplify processes to improve reliability and speed. DevOps serves as a key resource for tackling principles like continuous delivery, continuous integration, collaboration, and automation.

And when it comes to the application lifecycle, it’s important to recognize how DevOps and ALM work in tandem to ensure the success of a product.

Application lifecycle management (ALM) is the overall framework for building and handling changes to your applications, from design to final release. Think of it as your agile change management helper.

It helps you manage change requests, speed up development, and avoid costly mistakes in production. And source control lets you test commits from one central place so you can create your own functionality with precision.

ALM can be considered the “what” — in other words, testing your application. Meanwhile, DevOps is the “how” — automating that testing experience by merging code seamlessly.

Technology transformed every industry from banking to retail, and software is now more than a simple nice-to-have – it’s become a big part of how businesses operate.

From mobile applications to online services, software also plays an important role in increasing operational efficiencies throughout the value chain (such as logistics, communications, and operations).

A faster application development process means more efficiency for IT teams and improved capabilities for business users. It also means getting new products to market sooner. And with collaboration at the heart of DevOps, extended time spent on handoffs and crafting perfectly syncing code is of the past. As developers and operations teams work together, efficiency is inevitable.

Companies that embrace a DevOps culture see an average of 25% reduction in IT costs, a 30% increase in deployment rates, and a 28% increase in developer productivity.

Faster application development increases ROI by up to 285%, reduces time to market, and increases efficiency for IT teams. That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to DevOps benefits. When IT is fueled by DevOps, you can expect major improvements in:

• Speed and efficiency
• Cross collaboration
• Frequent updates through continuous integration/deployment
• Application quality and reliability
• Career growth
• Organizational flexibility
• Cost efficiency
• Risk reduction and security

And that’s only to name a few. A deeper understanding of the benefits of DevOps will allow you to visualize what improvements your organization may need and how you can transform it.

One of the most beneficial applications teams have experienced is the use of DevOps automation and infrastructure as code (IaC). It’s essential to handle your infrastructure and development processes at scale.

This means using automation to make it easy to tackle complex or ever-changing systems. Infrastructure as code is also a great example because it lets you manage development, testing, and production setups efficiently.

Automation, AI, and machine learning all allow for quicker and more reliable development, monitoring, and feedback. The efficiency and quality provided will only continue to grow as AI and machine learning evolve.

Embracing these DevOps best practices is the key to boosting efficiency, ramping up productivity, and saving costs.

Here are some key practices that can help your team thrive in a DevOps environment:

• Managing projects through Agile
• Continuous integration/continuous development
• Automated testing
• DevOps pipeline monitoring
• Observability
• Right tools and metrics
• Early applied security
• Continuous feedback
• Real-time monitoring
• Maintaining a healthy culture

It’s also important to consider these DevOps principles to drive the foundation of success for teams: collaboration, empathy, continuous improvement, responsibility, and failure as a learning opportunity.

A handful of adjacent systems and methodologies either function directly within the DevOps framework or have distinct functions of their own. This can create confusion for some teams looking to implement DevOps. Let’s examine the key differences and collaborative aspects among them.

• DevOps vs. CI/CD: Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) works within the DevOps pipeline to ensure frequent code updates happen securely. CI/CD will source, build, test, and deploy code throughout the DevOps phases to prevent product defects. As a result, teams can automate quality control throughout the fast-paced DevOps process.
• DevOps vs. SRE: SRE works together with DevOps to create smooth and successful development. SRE is mainly responsible for carefully monitoring the reliability and scalability of DevOps features and limiting failure rates of any changes made to the product throughout development.
• DevOps vs. DevSecOps: Security is generally built into regular DevOps workflows with active security audits and testing, but DevSecOps takes it a step further by prioritizing cloud security while working to reduce vulnerabilities in each phase of development.
• DevOps vs. Agile: DevOps applies Agile principles to the software development process, meaning both allow for iteration, collaboration, and fast-paced delivery. However, these practices diverge in how they’re applied; DevOps is explicitly geared toward technology and software development.
• DevOps vs. waterfall development: Waterfall methodology is best used in more predictable and small-scale software development projects that can withstand a strictly linear progression. Waterfall is generally slower, less collaborative, and allows less room for iterations or change. This causes Waterfall to clash in a DevOps environment or vice-versa.

The main development phases of DevOps are:

• Plan: Start by defining project requirements and breaking them into individual tasks. Then, with the development team, share detailed design specifications and identify the different development and testing environments your teams will need throughout the process.
• Build: Using specifications from earlier, developers will write the application code and compile the code into executable artifacts. This includes setting up version control systems to manage changes and collaboration among team members. A successful creation phase will often include AI and automation for maximal efficiency.
• Test: The compiled code is put through tests to identify any bugs and issues before merging them with changes from other teams. This helps your team check that the code meets quality standards before it moves to the next phase. At this stage, you’ll consolidate all assets created or updated by the team into a single-release artifact that aligns with the project requirements.

FYI: This phase will also involve performing user-acceptance testing (UAT) to see if everything works how you want it to, especially in a production environment. This includes managing the infrastructure, monitoring system performance, and performing routine maintenance tasks. Automation is often employed during this phase to make sure everything is consistent and error-free.

• Release: The software is prepared for deployment – which includes finalizing documentation, setting up release notes, and ensuring all necessary approvals are in place.
• Observe: The monitoring phase involves continuously tracking the application's performance and user experience. Monitoring tools help identify issues that are happening, allowing for quick responses to any problems that arise.

Remember that even though DevOps phases are sequential in theory, they have ample room built in for adjustment within each stage, and are part of a continual process. Team members are assigned to each phase to execute tasks and carefully monitor success.

The development stage is just one piece of the DevOps integration puzzle. Building out an entire DevOps pipeline will require your organization to apply structural learning across all projects and organizational practices.

You can simplify this process with high-quality support from Salesforce by building your DevOps pipeline within DevOps Center.

When combined, DevOps and ALM capabilities make software easier to build, provide better experiences for your customers, and assist in launching new features and app experiences quickly and reliably.

Not only is it important to choose the right DevOps tools for your organization, but having access to expert direction will ensure you see as much success with them as possible from the start. Learn how to implement DevOps best practices and explore process templates in the Salesforce DevOps guide to get you started.