How To Build a DevOps Culture

Those who work with Software Development may be used to the term DevOps. But for employees who work in other areas of the company, the real meaning of the word could be a little bit confusing. 

Do you know what means DevOps culture and why it is so relevant? What are the benefits of adopting this philosophy in the company when creating a digital solution?  

In IT, it is difficult to combine such different areas as Operation and Development. While the first one is related to ensuring the stability of the environment or the infrastructure, the second one aims at delivering value with new features and improvements in the enterprise software. The massification of Agile Methodology, which promotes an iterative, incremental development format, highlighted this separation and demanded a new form of communication. 

What is DevOps?

We can say that DevOps is a set of practices aiming at strengthening the relationships between Developers (Dev) and Operation (Ops), allowing them to work in a unified and collaborative manner to deliver value to the user. Although the need to integrate teams has long been discussed, the term was coined only in 2009 during the Velocity Conference by O’Reilly. Patrick Debois, one of the attendees of this conference, is the creator of the DevOpsDay Event. 

It is possible to say that the DevOps embryo is called Agile infrastructure. To adopt this culture, it is possible to have tools that will allow this constant integration between teams. In this sense, it is worth highlighting that none of this will be effective if the employees are not willing to create this collaboration environment. For this reason, it is necessary to change the team’s mindset to an Agile Culture, giving maximum contribution to joint work. 

DevOps Practices

For the benefits of implementing a DevOps culture to be perceived by the organization, it is important to use practices from this philosophy consistently. The key guidance is the one we commented above: communication and collaboration, two of the four pillars of DevOps culture. In addition to them, we also have measurement (assessment) and automation. 

The first refers to measuring and analyzing as many items as possible, from performance to processes, because we will be able to propose enhancements from this analysis. The latter has the goal of automating all possible processes, reducing time loss and the risk of human faults. We have some disseminated practices in automation, such as: 

Infrastructure As A Code: to manage and provision resources automatically, instead of making a feature available manually. This practice increases speed and reliability when installing the software in a new environment, for example. 

This occurs because we have guarantee that all items were executed in the same manner. Additionally, this application maintenance also becomes effective.  Here, we can use some technologies, such as: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Vagrant, Docker, Kubernertes. 

Continuous Integration: in this practice, we use a version control enterprise software such as Git, for example. The source code must be integrated as quickly as possible, several times a day, in a branch shared among project developers. 

This process allows them to have the updated code, avoiding possible conflicts both in the code and in business rules. In continuous integration, for each code sent to the repository a compilation is made and automated/unit tests are conducted. This ensures that it is ready for deployment. 

Continuous Delivery: the enterprise software deployment is offered in an automated, fast and safe manner. When we use continuous delivery, we must make sure that the main branch of the repository is in stable state, so we can deploy the software at any time. Usually, automated pipelines that compile, test and deploy are used. 

Benefits of Adopting DevOps Culture

From the definition we have seen previously, it is possible to see a series of benefits that adopting this practice promotes. One of them is the reliability of what is being delivered, whether new features or changes in infrastructure. Operation security is also benefited from the automation of compliance policies and other management techniques. 

Speed and ability to adapt to changes also increase. With the DevOps culture, it is possible to correct bugs and launch new features with more agility and lower risk of downtimes, for example. Additionally, the application scalability becomes more fluid and secure from automated processes and shared responsibility. This way, with areas working in an integrated manner, it is possible to make even better deliveries. 

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