Breaking Down DevOps: An Easy-to-Understand Introduction

What is DevOps? As an absolute beginner, this is one of the most common questions one may have. There are ample resources on the web explaining DevOps in detail. However, if I were to explain—What is DevOps?—to someone who is a beginner, how would I go about it? In this article, that’s exactly what I am going to share.

I am going to explain DevOps from the perspectives listed below: 

• Understanding DevOps in very simple words.
• Understanding DevOps in technical terms.
• An organization’s perspective on DevOps.
• Understanding DevOps from a developer’s viewpoint.

Understanding DevOps

In Simple Words

Consider a scenario where a software development company is working on creating a software application. Now, to understand DevOps, it is important to understand the key stages of the software application’s life cycle overall because it plays a key role in defining DevOps.

At high-level, a software application would go through the following four key stages:

1. Development of the application.
2. Testing of the application.
3. Deployment of the application.
4. Monitoring and maintaining the deployed application.

Traditionally, the above stages are primarily divided between the two core teams:

1. Development team: The development team develops the software application.
2. Operations team: The operations team deploys the application and maintains it. 

In the world before DevOps, both of these teams generally would just focus only on their own responsibilities. Most of the time, they would be working in silos. With that approach, it led to a set of challenges and also slowed down the overall cycle of making software applications available to the end users. This was the old-school story before DevOps.

In the modern world of software applications, DevOps is playing an important role to bridge the gap between the development and operations teams. DevOps is helping to solve some of the key challenges and pain points. If we have to understand DevOps in simple words, DevOps is a bridge between development and operations.

In Technical Terms

Now that you understand that DevOps is a bridge between development and operations: let’s try to understand DevOps in technical terms.

DevOps mainly aims to automate and streamline the processes to make sure the development to the release cycle of a software application is done as quickly as possible.

If we breakdown the word DevOps, we get:

• Dev: Mainly refers to planning, coding, building, and testing.
• Ops: Refers to releasing, deploying, operating, and monitoring. 

DevOps focuses on this end-to-end cycle. With agile planning, continuous development, automated testing, continuous integration and delivery, continuous deployment, continuous monitoring, effective communication, and collaboration, DevOps plays a key role and helps make quality software applications available to business users rapidly. 

In technical terms, DevOps is basically an automation of processes and operations.

From an Organization’s Perspective

Now, let’s try to understand what DevOps is from an organization’s viewpoint. Every organization’s core focus is to effectively solve their customer’s business problems. 

As a part of the fail-fast approach, organizations nowadays follow agile methodology to iteratively develop and release software applications as fast as possible to the end users. This essentially helps enhance and improve the software application experience as per the need of the business user. 

DevOps play a major role to achieve this fast-paced development to delivery cycle. In essence, DevOps is a software paradigm that establishes a set of practices through automated processes (using cutting-edge tools) to make the development to the delivery cycle of a software application much faster. 

From an organization’s perspective, DevOps is an asset and investment to boost business at speed. 

From a Developer’s Perspective

Having understood what DevOps is and how it benefits the organization, let’s take a look at what it has to offer for software professionals. 

DevOps is a rapidly growing and highly in-demand field. We also can’t forget to mention DevSecOps; however, this article is focused on DevOps, so let's get back to that. 

Being a DevOps professional requires an understanding of:

• Software development
• Deployment
• Maintenance
• Processes
• Quality
• Automation
• Effective communication
• A plethora of other things. 

As a software professional, it has much to offer in terms of learning new tools and technologies. At the same time, due to higher demand, being a skilled DevOps professional would surely help to skyrocket career growth.

Conclusion

In this article, we have tried to get an understanding of DevOps. We understood DevOps in layman’s terms; We talked about What DevOps is in technical terms; We looked at DevOps from an organization’s point of view; and we understood What DevOps is from a developer’s perspective. This is how I would have explained DevOps to a beginner. You may have a different viewpoint altogether about it, and I would love to learn more from your feedback.