DevOps Practices embody collaboration, automation, and communication between development and IT operations. It encompasses continuous integration, delivery, and deployment, coupled with principles like automation, collaboration, and monitoring. Notable examples include Netflix, Amazon Web Services, and Etsy. Benefits include accelerated delivery, enhanced code quality, and reduced risks.
Integration of Development and Operations: DevOps is centered around integrating development and operations teams and practices to ensure reliable software delivery.
Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment: It emphasizes continuous practices, including integration, delivery, and deployment, to automate and streamline the software development process.
Principles:
Automation for Efficiency and Consistency: DevOps principles prioritize automation to achieve greater efficiency, consistency, and repeatability in software development and deployment.
Collaboration through Cross-Functional Teamwork: DevOps encourages collaboration among cross-functional teams, breaking down silos and fostering a culture of shared responsibility.
Monitoring for Performance and Reliability: Monitoring is a key principle to ensure the performance and reliability of software systems, allowing for rapid identification and resolution of issues.
Characteristics:
Agile Development, Iterative, and Responsive: DevOps aligns with Agile principles, promoting iterative and responsive development processes that can quickly adapt to changing requirements.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): The practice of automating infrastructure provisioning through code (IaC) is a hallmark of DevOps, allowing for automated and consistent infrastructure management.
Continuous Testing Throughout the Lifecycle: DevOps incorporates continuous testing throughout the software development lifecycle to identify and address issues early.
Examples:
Netflix: Netflix is known for its frequent deployments, automated testing, and extensive monitoring practices, which enable it to deliver a reliable streaming service.
Amazon Web Services (AWS): AWS exemplifies infrastructure provisioning through automation, offering a wide range of services that allow users to provision resources programmatically.
Etsy: Etsy promotes a collaborative culture, rapid releases, and robust monitoring, enabling it to maintain a dynamic online marketplace.
Benefits:
Faster Delivery Cycles and Quicker Feature Deployment: DevOps practices lead to shorter delivery cycles and faster feature deployment, allowing organizations to respond rapidly to market demands.
Improved Code Quality Through Automated Testing: Automated testing in DevOps helps improve code quality by identifying and addressing issues early in the development process.
Reduced Errors and Faster Recovery from Failures: Automation and monitoring reduce errors, and when issues do arise, DevOps practices enable quicker recovery and resolution, minimizing downtime and disruptions.
Key Conclusions – DevOps:
DevOps is an approach that integrates development and operations, emphasizing continuous practices and automation to ensure reliable software delivery.
Its core principles include automation for efficiency, collaboration through cross-functional teamwork, and monitoring for performance and reliability.
DevOps characteristics align with Agile development, promote Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for automated provisioning, and incorporate continuous testing throughout the software development lifecycle.
Organizations such as Netflix, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Etsy have successfully implemented DevOps practices, leading to faster delivery cycles, improved code quality, and better error management.
The benefits of DevOps include quicker feature deployment, enhanced code quality through automated testing, and reduced errors with faster recovery from failures.
Related Frameworks, Models, or Concepts
Description
When to Apply
Continuous Integration (CI)
– Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development practice where code changes are automatically integrated into a shared repository and tested frequently, typically multiple times a day. CI aims to improve collaboration among developers, detect integration errors early, and ensure that code changes do not break the build. By automating the build and test process, CI helps teams deliver software more quickly, reliably, and with higher quality.
– When developing software applications using Agile methodologies, or when multiple developers are working on the same codebase concurrently. – Applicable in industries such as software development, IT operations, and web development to streamline the integration and testing process and accelerate software delivery using CI practices.
Continuous Delivery (CD)
– Continuous Delivery (CD) is an extension of Continuous Integration (CI) where code changes that pass automated tests are automatically deployed to production environments. CD aims to minimize manual intervention in the deployment process, reduce lead times, and enable teams to release software updates to customers quickly, safely, and frequently. By automating the deployment pipeline, CD helps teams deliver value to users continuously and respond rapidly to changing market demands.
– When implementing Agile and DevOps principles, or when striving to achieve shorter release cycles and faster time to market for software products and digital services. – Applicable in industries such as e-commerce, fintech, and SaaS to establish a culture of continuous delivery and enable teams to deliver value to customers continuously using CD practices and tooling solutions.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
– Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a DevOps practice where infrastructure is defined and managed using code and version-controlled repositories. IaC enables teams to automate the provisioning, configuration, and management of infrastructure resources such as servers, networks, and storage using declarative or imperative code. By treating infrastructure as code, teams can achieve consistency, repeatability, and scalability in their infrastructure deployments, reduce manual errors, and improve overall operational efficiency.
– When deploying and managing infrastructure in cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, or when adopting DevOps practices to automate infrastructure provisioning and configuration. – Applicable in industries such as cloud computing, DevOps engineering, and IT operations to streamline infrastructure management and enable agile, scalable deployments using IaC techniques and tooling solutions.
Microservices Architecture
– Microservices Architecture is an architectural style where software applications are composed of small, independently deployable services that are organized around business capabilities and communicate via lightweight APIs. Microservices promote modularity, flexibility, and scalability by decoupling services and allowing them to be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. By breaking down monolithic applications into smaller, more manageable services, teams can improve agility, facilitate continuous delivery, and enable faster innovation and experimentation.
– When designing and developing modern, cloud-native applications or when migrating existing monolithic applications to a microservices architecture to achieve greater agility and scalability. – Applicable in industries such as e-commerce, social media, and financial services to enable rapid development and deployment of scalable, resilient software solutions using microservices architecture principles and patterns.
Containerization
– Containerization is a lightweight virtualization technology where applications and their dependencies are packaged together in a standardized format called containers. Containers provide a consistent runtime environment that is isolated from the underlying infrastructure, enabling applications to run reliably across different environments. Containerization platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, allowing teams to deliver software quickly and consistently across diverse environments.
– When developing, deploying, and managing cloud-native applications or when building scalable, portable software solutions using containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes. – Applicable in industries such as cloud computing, software development, and DevOps engineering to streamline application deployment and improve infrastructure utilization using containerization platforms and orchestration tools.
Monitoring and Observability
– Monitoring and Observability are practices that involve collecting, analyzing, and visualizing data about the behavior and performance of software applications and infrastructure in real-time. Monitoring focuses on tracking metrics, logs, and events to detect and diagnose issues proactively, while observability emphasizes understanding the internal state and interactions of systems through instrumentation and telemetry data. By monitoring and observing applications and infrastructure, teams can identify trends, detect anomalies, and troubleshoot issues more effectively, ensuring the reliability and performance of their systems.
– When operating and maintaining software applications in production environments or when implementing DevOps practices to improve system reliability and performance. – Applicable in industries such as IT operations, site reliability engineering, and cloud services to monitor and optimize the performance of applications and infrastructure using monitoring and observability tools and techniques.
Automated Testing
– Automated Testing is a DevOps practice where software tests are executed automatically using test automation frameworks and tools. Automated testing helps teams validate software functionality, performance, and security quickly and efficiently, enabling them to detect defects early and deliver high-quality software with confidence. By automating repetitive and time-consuming testing tasks, teams can accelerate release cycles, reduce manual errors, and improve overall test coverage and reliability.
– When developing software applications using Agile methodologies or when implementing continuous integration and delivery pipelines to automate the testing process. – Applicable in industries such as software quality assurance, DevOps engineering, and cybersecurity to ensure the reliability and security of software products using automated testing practices and tooling solutions.
Configuration Management
– Configuration Management is a DevOps practice where infrastructure configurations and application settings are managed and maintained systematically to ensure consistency, reliability, and traceability. Configuration management involves defining, versioning, and automating the deployment of configuration settings using configuration management tools such as Ansible, Puppet, or Chef. By managing configurations as code, teams can enforce desired state configurations, track changes, and roll back to previous configurations if needed, enabling them to maintain system integrity and compliance over time.
– When deploying and managing infrastructure at scale or when implementing DevOps practices to automate configuration provisioning and enforcement. – Applicable in industries such as IT operations, cloud computing, and compliance management to standardize configurations and enforce security policies using configuration management techniques and tooling solutions.
GitOps
– GitOps is a set of practices that leverage Git repositories as the source of truth for declarative infrastructure and application definitions. GitOps combines infrastructure as code (IaC) with version control and continuous delivery (CD) principles to automate the deployment, monitoring, and management of cloud-native applications and infrastructure. By using Git as the primary workflow and synchronization mechanism, GitOps enables teams to implement change management, rollbacks, and audit trails effectively, ensuring consistency and reliability in their deployments.
– When managing Kubernetes clusters, cloud-native applications, or infrastructure deployments in distributed environments or when adopting GitOps practices to streamline DevOps workflows and improve deployment reliability and consistency. – Applicable in industries such as SRE (Site Reliability Engineering), cloud-native computing, and DevOps engineering to automate infrastructure management and increase operational efficiency using GitOps principles and methodologies.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
– Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is an engineering discipline that applies software engineering principles to operations tasks, with a focus on reliability, scalability, and performance. SRE emphasizes automation, observability, and error budgeting to achieve and maintain service level objectives (SLOs) for software systems. By embedding software engineers with operational responsibilities, SRE enables teams to proactively address reliability issues, minimize downtime, and improve overall system resilience and availability.
– When managing and operating large-scale, distributed systems or when adopting DevOps practices to improve system reliability, scalability, and performance. – Applicable in industries such as cloud computing, online services, and e-commerce to ensure the reliability and availability of software products and digital services using SRE principles and practices.
AIOps is the application of artificial intelligence to IT operations. It has become particularly useful for modern IT management in hybridized, distributed, and dynamic environments. AIOps has become a key operational component of modern digital-based organizations, built around software and algorithms.
Agile started as a lightweight development method compared to heavyweight software development, which is the core paradigm of the previous decades of software development. By 2001 the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was born as a set of principles that defined the new paradigm for software development as a continuous iteration. This would also influence the way of doing business.
Agile Program Management is a means of managing, planning, and coordinating interrelated work in such a way that value delivery is emphasized for all key stakeholders. Agile Program Management (AgilePgM) is a disciplined yet flexible agile approach to managing transformational change within an organization.
Agile project management (APM) is a strategy that breaks large projects into smaller, more manageable tasks. In the APM methodology, each project is completed in small sections – often referred to as iterations. Each iteration is completed according to its project life cycle, beginning with the initial design and progressing to testing and then quality assurance.
Agile Modeling (AM) is a methodology for modeling and documenting software-based systems. Agile Modeling is critical to the rapid and continuous delivery of software. It is a collection of values, principles, and practices that guide effective, lightweight software modeling.
Agile Business Analysis (AgileBA) is certification in the form of guidance and training for business analysts seeking to work in agile environments. To support this shift, AgileBA also helps the business analyst relate Agile projects to a wider organizational mission or strategy. To ensure that analysts have the necessary skills and expertise, AgileBA certification was developed.
Agile leadership is the embodiment of agile manifesto principles by a manager or management team. Agile leadership impacts two important levels of a business. The structural level defines the roles, responsibilities, and key performance indicators. The behavioral level describes the actions leaders exhibit to others based on agile principles.
The andon system alerts managerial, maintenance, or other staff of a production process problem. The alert itself can be activated manually with a button or pull cord, but it can also be activated automatically by production equipment. Most Andon boards utilize three colored lights similar to a traffic signal: green (no errors), yellow or amber (problem identified, or quality check needed), and red (production stopped due to unidentified issue).
Bimodal Portfolio Management (BimodalPfM) helps an organization manage both agile and traditional portfolios concurrently. Bimodal Portfolio Management – sometimes referred to as bimodal development – was coined by research and advisory company Gartner. The firm argued that many agile organizations still needed to run some aspects of their operations using traditional delivery models.
Business innovation is about creating new opportunities for an organization to reinvent its core offerings, revenue streams, and enhance the value proposition for existing or new customers, thus renewing its whole business model. Business innovation springs by understanding the structure of the market, thus adapting or anticipating those changes.
Business modelinnovation is about increasing the success of an organization with existing products and technologies by crafting a compelling value proposition able to propel a new business model to scale up customers and create a lasting competitive advantage. And it all starts by mastering the key customers.
A consumer brand company like Procter & Gamble (P&G) defines “Constructive Disruption” as: a willingness to change, adapt, and create new trends and technologies that will shape our industry for the future. According to P&G, it moves around four pillars: lean innovation, brand building, supply chain, and digitalization & data analytics.
That is a process that requires a continuous feedback loop to develop a valuable product and build a viable business model. Continuous innovation is a mindset where products and services are designed and delivered to tune them around the customers’ problem and not the technical solution of its founders.
A design sprint is a proven five-day process where critical business questions are answered through speedy design and prototyping, focusing on the end-user. A design sprint starts with a weekly challenge that should finish with a prototype, test at the end, and therefore a lesson learned to be iterated.
Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO, defined design thinking as “a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” Therefore, desirability, feasibility, and viability are balanced to solve critical problems.
DevOps refers to a series of practices performed to perform automated software development processes. It is a conjugation of the term “development” and “operations” to emphasize how functions integrate across IT teams. DevOps strategies promote seamless building, testing, and deployment of products. It aims to bridge a gap between development and operations teams to streamline the development altogether.
Product discovery is a critical part of agile methodologies, as its aim is to ensure that products customers love are built. Product discovery involves learning through a raft of methods, including design thinking, lean start-up, and A/B testing to name a few. Dual Track Agile is an agile methodology containing two separate tracks: the “discovery” track and the “delivery” track.
eXtreme Programming was developed in the late 1990s by Ken Beck, Ron Jeffries, and Ward Cunningham. During this time, the trio was working on the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System (C3) to help manage the company payroll system. eXtreme Programming (XP) is a software development methodology. It is designed to improve software quality and the ability of software to adapt to changing customer needs.
Feature-Driven Development is a pragmatic software process that is client and architecture-centric. Feature-Driven Development (FDD) is an agile software development model that organizes workflow according to which features need to be developed next.
A Gemba Walk is a fundamental component of lean management. It describes the personal observation of work to learn more about it. Gemba is a Japanese word that loosely translates as “the real place”, or in business, “the place where value is created”. The Gemba Walk as a concept was created by Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System of lean manufacturing. Ohno wanted to encourage management executives to leave their offices and see where the real work happened. This, he hoped, would build relationships between employees with vastly different skillsets and build trust.
GIST Planning is a relatively easy and lightweight agile approach to product planning that favors autonomous working. GIST Planning is a lean and agile methodology that was created by former Google product manager Itamar Gilad. GIST Planning seeks to address this situation by creating lightweight plans that are responsive and adaptable to change. GIST Planning also improves team velocity, autonomy, and alignment by reducing the pervasive influence of management. It consists of four blocks: goals, ideas, step-projects, and tasks.
The ICE Scoring Model is an agile methodology that prioritizes features using data according to three components: impact, confidence, and ease of implementation. The ICE Scoring Model was initially created by author and growth expert Sean Ellis to help companies expand. Today, the model is broadly used to prioritize projects, features, initiatives, and rollouts. It is ideally suited for early-stage product development where there is a continuous flow of ideas and momentum must be maintained.
An innovation funnel is a tool or process ensuring only the best ideas are executed. In a metaphorical sense, the funnel screens innovative ideas for viability so that only the best products, processes, or business models are launched to the market. An innovation funnel provides a framework for the screening and testing of innovative ideas for viability.
According to how well defined is the problem and how well defined the domain, we have four main types of innovations: basic research (problem and domain or not well defined); breakthrough innovation (domain is not well defined, the problem is well defined); sustaining innovation (both problem and domain are well defined); and disruptive innovation (domain is well defined, the problem is not well defined).
The innovation loop is a methodology/framework derived from the Bell Labs, which produced innovation at scale throughout the 20th century. They learned how to leverage a hybrid innovation management model based on science, invention, engineering, and manufacturing at scale. By leveraging individual genius, creativity, and small/large groups.
The Agile methodology has been primarily thought of for software development (and other business disciplines have also adopted it). Lean thinking is a process improvement technique where teams prioritize the value streams to improve it continuously. Both methodologies look at the customer as the key driver to improvement and waste reduction. Both methodologies look at improvement as something continuous.
A startup company is a high-tech business that tries to build a scalable business model in tech-driven industries. A startup company usually follows a lean methodology, where continuous innovation, driven by built-in viral loops is the rule. Thus, driving growth and building network effects as a consequence of this strategy.
As pointed out by Eric Ries, a minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort through a cycle of build, measure, learn; that is the foundation of the lean startup methodology.
Kanban is a lean manufacturing framework first developed by Toyota in the late 1940s. The Kanban framework is a means of visualizing work as it moves through identifying potential bottlenecks. It does that through a process called just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing to optimize engineering processes, speed up manufacturing products, and improve the go-to-market strategy.
Jidoka was first used in 1896 by Sakichi Toyoda, who invented a textile loom that would stop automatically when it encountered a defective thread. Jidoka is a Japanese term used in lean manufacturing. The term describes a scenario where machines cease operating without human intervention when a problem or defect is discovered.
The PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle was first proposed by American physicist and engineer Walter A. Shewhart in the 1920s. The PDCA cycle is a continuous process and product improvement method and an essential component of the lean manufacturing philosophy.
RAD was first introduced by author and consultant James Martin in 1991. Martin recognized and then took advantage of the endless malleability of software in designing development models. Rapid Application Development (RAD) is a methodology focusing on delivering rapidly through continuous feedback and frequent iterations.
Retrospective analyses are held after a project to determine what worked well and what did not. They are also conducted at the end of an iteration in Agile project management. Agile practitioners call these meetings retrospectives or retros. They are an effective way to check the pulse of a project team, reflect on the work performed to date, and reach a consensus on how to tackle the next sprint cycle. These are the five stages of a retrospective analysis for effective Agile project management: set the stage, gather the data, generate insights, decide on the next steps, and close the retrospective.
Scaled Agile Lean Development (ScALeD) helps businesses discover a balanced approach to agile transition and scaling questions. The ScALed approach helps businesses successfully respond to change. Inspired by a combination of lean and agile values, ScALed is practitioner-based and can be completed through various agile frameworks and practices.
The SMED (single minute exchange of die) method is a lean production framework to reduce waste and increase production efficiency. The SMED method is a framework for reducing the time associated with completing an equipment changeover.
The Spotify Model is an autonomous approach to scaling agile, focusing on culture communication, accountability, and quality. The Spotify model was first recognized in 2012 after Henrik Kniberg, and Anders Ivarsson released a white paper detailing how streaming company Spotify approached agility. Therefore, the Spotify model represents an evolution of agile.
As the name suggests, TDD is a test-driven technique for delivering high-quality software rapidly and sustainably. It is an iterative approach based on the idea that a failing test should be written before any code for a feature or function is written. Test-Driven Development (TDD) is an approach to software development that relies on very short development cycles.
Timeboxing is a simple yet powerful time-management technique for improving productivity. Timeboxing describes the process of proactively scheduling a block of time to spend on a task in the future. It was first described by author James Martin in a book about agile software development.
Scrum is a methodology co-created by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland for effective team collaboration on complex products. Scrum was primarily thought for software development projects to deliver new software capability every 2-4 weeks. It is a sub-group of agile also used in project management to improve startups’ productivity.
Scrumban is a project management framework that is a hybrid of two popular agile methodologies: Scrum and Kanban. Scrumban is a popular approach to helping businesses focus on the right strategic tasks while simultaneously strengthening their processes.
Scrum anti-patterns describe any attractive, easy-to-implement solution that ultimately makes a problem worse. Therefore, these are the practice not to follow to prevent issues from emerging. Some classic examples of scrum anti-patterns comprise absent product owners, pre-assigned tickets (making individuals work in isolation), and discounting retrospectives (where review meetings are not useful to really make improvements).
Scrum at Scale (Scrum@Scale) is a framework that Scrum teams use to address complex problems and deliver high-value products. Scrum at Scale was created through a joint venture between the Scrum Alliance and Scrum Inc. The joint venture was overseen by Jeff Sutherland, a co-creator of Scrum and one of the principal authors of the Agile Manifesto.
Six Sigma is a data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating errors or defects in a product, service, or process. Six Sigma was developed by Motorola as a management approach based on quality fundamentals in the early 1980s. A decade later, it was popularized by General Electric who estimated that the methodology saved them $12 billion in the first five years of operation.
Stretch objectives describe any task an agile team plans to complete without expressly committing to do so. Teams incorporate stretch objectives during a Sprint or Program Increment (PI) as part of Scaled Agile. They are used when the agile team is unsure of its capacity to attain an objective. Therefore, stretch objectives are instead outcomes that, while extremely desirable, are not the difference between the success or failure of each sprint.
The Toyota Production System (TPS) is an early form of lean manufacturing created by auto-manufacturer Toyota. Created by the Toyota Motor Corporation in the 1940s and 50s, the Toyota Production System seeks to manufacture vehicles ordered by customers most quickly and efficiently possible.
The Total Quality Management (TQM) framework is a technique based on the premise that employees continuously work on their ability to provide value to customers. Importantly, the word “total” means that all employees are involved in the process – regardless of whether they work in development, production, or fulfillment.
The waterfall model was first described by Herbert D. Benington in 1956 during a presentation about the software used in radar imaging during the Cold War. Since there were no knowledge-based, creative software development strategies at the time, the waterfall method became standard practice. The waterfall model is a linear and sequential project management framework.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
