Here is a Post n wrote for my Companies blog, originally posted here.

DevOps has become a hot topic in organisations over the past year or so. However, there seems to be a lot of confusion regarding what DevOps actually entails. So, what is DevOps?

If you asked a more sales-inclined individual, you may get a response along the lines of: “DevOps digitally transforms an organisation’s development department by bridging the gap between development and operations, resulting in higher quality solutions, fewer bugs, quicker delivery times, shorter recovery times, and controlling scope creep.”

This sounds amazing! However, it does not answer the question as to what DevOps really is. So, I will be taking a different approach to delve into what DevOps entails.

DevOps is based on the principal of continuous improvements in the Software Development Lifecycle, and consists of principles, practices and tools that allow an organisation’s development department to deliver projects at a high velocity, while maintaining quality and continuously improving the process associated with delivery. This is where Azure DevOps comes in. Azure DevOps is a selection of tools that facilitate the implementation of DevOps within an organisation.

DevOps consists of five main pillars (which are supported by processes, practices and tools), namely:

1. Plan and Track

This involves planning what development work needs to be completed and tracking progress against that. The tool Azure DevOps offers here is Azure Boards.

2. Develop

This is where your software developers write code and store that code. In the Azure DevOps ecosystem, the tools that used here are Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code and Azure Repos as a source code repository.

3. Build and Test

Automated builds and testing are a very important part of DevOps, as this automation frees up valuable resource time to focus on more imperative tasks. Automated builds can be set up to trigger new builds (compiling source code into executable programs) based on certain criteria (for example, “once a day”), and automated tests can then be run to verify that everything is working as expected without the intervention of a person.  Azure Pipelines and Azure Test Plans are the tools utilized here.

4. Deploy

The next step is Automated Deploy – first to a UAT\Test environment and eventually to production. Doing deploys in this manner prevents unwanted changes being accidentally deployed from a developer’s machine and introduces additional controls to only deploy what is wanted and limiting the introduction of problems.  By automating the deployment of systems deployment times are also drastically reduced and thus system down time is reduced. Azure Release Management is the Azure DevOps tool used to automate deployments.

5. Monitor and Operate

After a system has been deployed, it needs to be monitored and operational activities need to be performed to ensure it is up and running and running optimally. Azure Monitor and Application Insights are the tools available in the Azure DevOps tool-belt for this.

With the tools provided by Microsoft Azure DevOps, as well as industry tried and tested principles, the above five pillars can dramatically improve the operations and output of a development department while driving down operational costs.

Now that we understand what DevOps is and how it works, what outcomes can we expect from mastering the 5 pillars?

• Better quality solutions
• Quicker delivery times
• Fewer bugs
• Shorter recovery times to resolve bugs
• Prevents uncontrolled scope creep
• Improved collaboration and agility in teams
• Better cross-skilling in teams
• More automation