With changing times, the one industry which is continuously growing and changing is I.T industry. And the need of the changing world from this industry is to deliver, quality product or software solution, along with fast paced development and quicker time to market. Whether, it is an organization out sourcing their software solution work to a service-based I.T company, or a product-based I.T company developing their own product, everybody wants to remain ahead from their competitor, keeping intact the quality of the product.
One way of achieving all these aspects of fast-delivery and quality maintenance, is to incorporate automation, wherever possible, so that the software engineers can focus more on developing effective software designs.
That’s when DevOps comes into picture.
As you can figure out, DevOps is a combination of 2 words, Development & Operations, and bridges the gap between development and operations teams, which was the main barrier in fast-paced development of quality software.
So, DevOps can be termed as, set of practices that works to automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams, so they can build, test and release software faster and more reliably. DevOps can be divided into phases, each phase representing the process, capabilities and tools needed for development and operations.
The lifecycle includes phases to plan, build, continuously integrate and deploy (CI/CD), monitor, operate, and respond to continuous feedback.
Throughout each phase, teams collaborate and communicate to maintain alignment, velocity and quality. Hence, there’s no harm in saying, DevOps isn’t any single person’s job. It’s everyone’s job.
DevOps includes a range of services and tools corresponding to those services, under its umbrella, and there are quite a few prominent organizations which integrate these services, one of which is GRhombus, based out in USA, Netherlands and India.
GRhombus DevOps Services & tools
GRhombus consists of more than 20 such specialized tools in their arsenal to cater below DevOps services –
1. Agile Planning –
The process of effective and on time product delivery starts with proper planning. And Agile Methodology plays a vital role in the same. As part of this methodology, work items are compartmentalized into short modules and iterations, based on priority of the work, efforts required to complete the task, its dependency on other work items and availability of required engineers to achieve the same. Considering all such points, high level objective is drawn out to achieve. At GRhombus, this is achieved via, Jira Administration. Jira is the tool, which is used to keep a track of status and tasks of the project management life cycle.
2. Continuous Integration –
Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice, where developers integrate code into shared repository frequently, preferably several times a day. This continuous integration helps to quickly identify if new code changes are affecting any other code changes and to integrate them effectively and seamlessly. Each integration is verified by an automated build and automated tests. In short, CI doesn’t get rid of bugs, but it does make them dramatically easier to find and remove.
The tools which can be used to maintain that central repository are Git, Bitbucket etc. While CI tools used for automated builds and tests includes, Jenkins, Travis etc.
3. Version Controlling –
Version controlling helps to keep track of every change that’s made to the project over time and makes a note of when the changes were made, what the changes were, and who made them, providing invaluable context for whoever views these changes. Thus, providing effective maintenance of the project code.
Version control systems also support the ability to make branches of the main project, to allow for changes to be tested without altering the original project. Once these branches have been successfully tested and verified, they can then be merged with main project branch.
The most common tool used for version controlling is GitHub.
4. Code Quality Inspection –
We talked about this in brief, when we talked about automated tests, as part of CI. When developers push their code changes to tool like GitHub, other developers do manual code reviews to detect and eliminate the defects, as early as possible.
If anything misses out as part of manual reviews, automated tests counters for the same. Tools like Jenkins and Travis helps to achieve the same.
5. Continuous Deployment –
Once the coding aspect of task is done, changes are pushed for reviews, have passed the manual review process and also have passed through automated tests, it’s time to deploy the changes on the testing environments for QAs to test and make it production ready.
This task of deploying the code for QAs and making it production ready is done, as part of Continuous Deployment.
Jenkins is a CI/CD tool, which can perform task of CD along with CI and Fastlane is another tool which can perform CD.
6. Continuous Delivery –
Till continuous deployment, we have made our changes production ready, ready to be handed over to the users, by making them go through various tests and reviews and integrations.
The seamless delivery of changes is it new features, configuration changes, bug fixes and experiments, in the production and to the users is done as part of continuous delivery.
The goal of continuous delivery is to make deployments to production, a routine affair, which can be performed on demand effectively.
This can only be achieved, if all the tasks till continuous deployment are done effectively. Tools like GitLab can perform this task effectively.
7. Continuous Monitoring –
Continuous Monitoring is the last step in DevOps pipeline. Once the changes are deployed to production and available for users to use, continuous monitoring helps to notify in the event of specific issues arising in the production environment. It provides feedback on what is going wrong, which allows the relevant people to work on necessary fixes as soon as possible.
Tools like New Relic, Application Insights are used for continuous monitoring.
