Traditionally what happens is that software developers write codes for weeks and months and hands over the code to QA team for testing which then hands over the final release to operations team for deployment. There is lack of collaboration between all these three phases i.e. development, testing, and Deployment.
Developers write the code and hands over to the deployment team. Now it’s up to deployment team to fix the problems that arise during deployment of code or hands over the code altogether back to the development team to fix the bugs. All this results in a slowing of software development process.
But under the umbrella of DevOps model, these three teams are no longer isolated from each other. Most of the times these three teams are merged into a single team where the engineers work
across the entire application lifecycle, from development and test to deployment to operations, and develop a range of skills not limited to a single function. Security teams may also become more tightly integrated with development and operations and throughout the application lifecycle.
DevOps engineer is not a new thing. It’s a set of engineers like system engineer, build automation engineer, software engineer, Linux engineer and so on.
However, DevOps engineer nature of work varies from organization to organization. In some cases, its role is automation of infrastructure and maintaining it. While some organizations span their role to the entire delivery chain.
| Old Process | DevOps |
| After placing an order for new servers, the Development team works on testing. The Operations team works on extensive paperwork as required in enterprises to deploy the infrastructure. | After placing an order for new servers Development and Operations team work together on the paperwork to set-up the new servers. This results in better visibility of infrastructure requirement. |
| Projection about failover, redundancy, data center locations, and storage requirements are skewed as no inputs are available from developers who have deep knowledge of the application. | Projection about failover, redundancy, disaster recovery, data center locations, and storage requirements are pretty accurate due to the inputs from the developers. |
| Operations team has no clue on the progress of the Development team. Operations team develops a monitoring plan as per their understanding. | In DevOps, the Operations team is completely aware of the progress the developers are making. Operations team interact with developers and jointly develop a monitoring plan that caters to the IT and business needs. They also use advance Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Tools |
| Before go-live, the load testing crashes the application. The release is delayed. | Before go-live, the load testing makes the application a bit slow. The development team quickly fixes the bottlenecks. The application is released on time. |
