DevOps – Tools and Applications
Companies of all sizes are constantly working to improve their release processes to minimize time-consuming work, error-prone procedures, and manual human intervention in the delivery and operation of modern applications. The term DevOps (a combination of development and operations) describes a methodology developed to increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services faster than traditional software development processes by improving collaboration between traditionally siloed development and operations teams throughout the entire software application lifecycle.
Huge market potential
The introduction of DevOps into everyday development practices in companies has been accompanied by an explosion of tools for release and configuration management, orchestration, monitoring, virtualization, and containerization. According to a report by Markets and Markets , the DevOps market size is expected to grow from $3.4 billion in 2018 to $10.3 billion by 2023, at a compound annual growth rate of 24.7% during the forecast period. In response to this momentum surrounding continuous delivery and infrastructure automation, IT heavyweights such as Microsoft, Amazon, and SAP have long since developed their own DevOps toolboxes for their customers.
Microsoft Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps (formerly Visual Studio Team Services) is a hosted service from Microsoft that offers an end-to-end DevOps toolchain for software development and deployment. Azure DevOps has many built-in features for agile project tracking and planning to manage projects and automate workflows, as well as developer and DevOps tools for writing, building, and deploying code across the entire development lifecycle. These include:
- Azure Boards for agile planning, work item tracking, visualization and reporting,
- Azure Pipelines as a language-, platform- and cloud-independent CI/CD platform,
- Azure Repos, which provides cloud-hosted private Git repositories,
- Azure Artifacts for package management with support for Maven, npm, Python, and NuGet package feeds from public or private sources,
- Azure Test Plans, an integrated solution for planned and exploratory testing.
Azure DevOps can also be used to orchestrate third-party tools. Organizations can use Azure DevOps to optimize development pipelines and code repositories and track Agile/Scrum workflows across application development and IT operations. It provides a centralized, cloud-based solution for tracking CI/CD pipelines and simplifies the tracking of stories and features throughout sprint cycles. Using build and release pipelines for CI/CD automation, completed work can be deployed automatically and its progress tracked. The integrated tools required in Azure DevOps for developing modern applications using agile methodologies enable seamless development and continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) processes. Many pre-built deployment tasks/steps cover the most common use cases, and custom dashboards provide reports on build/release and agile metrics.
AWS DevOps
AWS DevOps is Amazon’s response to the implementation of the DevOps philosophy. DevOps principles and practices are embedded in the AWS platform and form the foundation for numerous AWS services, particularly in its deployment and monitoring offerings. Using the cloud platform and specialized tools and services, infrastructure provisioning and management, application code deployment, software release automation, and application and infrastructure performance monitoring can be simplified. Development teams can efficiently implement continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) by securely storing and versioning application source code while automatically building, testing, and ultimately deploying the application either to on-premises environments or to AWS. Automation ensures that resources scale according to business needs, making the entire process more flexible and cost-effective. AWS DevOps offers a comprehensive range of tools for building and deploying software in the cloud, including:
- AWS Cloud Development Kit – an open-source software development framework that uses familiar programming languages for modeling and deploying cloud application resources,
- AWS CodeBuild, an integration service that enables users to build and test code at continuous scale,
- AWS CodeDeploy for automated software deployment on various computing services such as Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda or other on-premises servers,
- AWS CodePipeline, which automates continuously delivered code for fast and accurate updates,
- AWS CodeStar, which enables users to effortlessly develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS and quickly and easily set up a complete continuous delivery toolchain,
- AWS Device Farm, a tool that enables developers to improve the quality of their web and mobile applications by testing them on real mobile devices and desktop browsers hosted in the AWS Cloud,
- AWS OpsWorks simplifies the configuration of common architectures.
DevOps tools automate manual tasks, help teams manage complex and large environments, simplify infrastructure provisioning and management, application code deployment, automate software release processes, and monitor application and infrastructure performance.
DevOps and SAP
In many cases, SAP is the heart of a large company. Everything depends on the systems functioning properly. Developers are wary of making rapid or frequent changes. The risk of “breaking something” is too great, leading the fear of change to outweigh the demand for updates or innovations. SAP has responded by developing DevOps for SAP to eliminate this problem by streamlining the entire change management process, with complete visibility into SAP environments, more efficient workflows, and the flexibility to make changes as needed as priorities shift. Quality control and testing are introduced in the earliest stages of software development and can be applied continuously to deliver critical changes safely and reliably. DevOps solves typical SAP problems such as a slow pace of change and a high risk of downtime and failures by supporting application delivery in shorter, more frequent delivery cycles, where quality is embedded into the process from the start and risk is significantly reduced. Because DevOps is not a simple process and requires multiple teams to work together cohesively and provide constant feedback, SAP has released tools to support this process. For example, SAP Focused Solutions was developed with agile DevOps processes in mind.
Focused Solutions are three turnkey, ready-to-use solutions consisting of the Focused Build Solution, the Focused Insights Solution, and the Focused Run Solution. The Focused Build Solution extends SAP Solution Manager with integrated processes and functions that support agile development and projects. Focused Build offers out-of-the-box support from the requirements phase to go-live, using SAP industry best practices and a common, standardized workflow methodology. Focused Insights Solutions offers ready-to-use dashboard templates that combine real-time or historical metrics from all SAP Solution Manager use cases. The Focused Run Solution monitors the entire SAP landscape.
Application examples in various industries
If you take a look at the different industries, you can see – in addition to the technology industry (which was to be expected) – three sectors in particular where DevOps is particularly popular: financial services, retail and telecommunications.
DevOps in banks
More and more so-called fintechs are entering the market with innovative ideas and without compromising on quality in order to meet the expectations of Generation Z. Banks thrive on constantly new, innovative offerings. The increased customer expectations associated with digitalization cannot be met with an isolated, silo-like IT architecture. Banks therefore need an environment that helps them develop, test, and debug their software quickly with reduced error rates and effort. DevOps, with concepts such as CI/CD, containers, and microservices, offers banks a method for continuously and seamlessly developing and delivering innovative services. DevOps simplifies and automates development processes, drastically reducing the cycle time from ideation to production and application management. This brings benefits not only in terms of cost and time, but also in terms of feature availability for companies.
Shorter deployment times with lower compliance risks
One particular problem is the application release orchestration process, which is typically complex, requires significant manual effort, is subject to strict compliance and security requirements, and must be performed more frequently due to increasingly shorter deployment cycles and increasingly complex interactions between upstream and downstream components. DevOps practices help financial services organizations shorten the development and deployment cycle time for new offerings and feature upgrades.
DevOps in Retail
Due to the increasing demand for continuous release and deployment of customer-facing applications at the right time and with high quality, the use of DevOps as a service with continuous delivery has also skyrocketed among retail companies. The digitalization of the customer journey is responsible for the retail industry’s reliance on the use of high-quality software for sustainability and growth. This is leading to retailers becoming increasingly involved in the software testing automation process.
Seamless multi-channel experience
In this entire testing workflow, test automation plays a crucial role in managing the massive testing volume to accelerate business and meet customer quality expectations. A DevOps test automation process helps identify defects earlier in the development cycle, enabling a process that meets customer quality. Rising customer expectations for a seamless multi-channel experience put pressure on retailers to continuously optimize all services across numerous online commerce channels. The DevOps approach helps retailers continuously monitor and test all product delivery versions at the right time to resolve defects in a timely manner without disrupting the product delivery and release pipeline.
Optimize the provision of digital services
Retailers face the problem that they cannot afford, for example, to launch a massive mobile commerce initiative and hope that it works seamlessly with customers’ mobile devices and is securely and easily integrated with their POS systems. Disappointed customers rarely return. Small and medium-sized businesses can open doors to many opportunities by incorporating DevOps into their digital transformation . Increasing the efficiency, productivity, and profitability of their business can only be achieved by small and medium-sized retailers if DevOps works and streamlines the delivery of technological solutions that meet business needs. And only the successful and timely adoption of DevOps in the enterprise will help the company beat the competitors and stay afloat as the industry accelerates.
DevOps in telecommunications
Next-generation mobile networks require a flexible system that enables the continuous delivery of new software services and patches without frequent service outages. Many telecom providers have recognized that DevOps is an approach to achieve continuous service delivery with minimal disruption.
5G is based on three main principles:
- Software-Defined Networking (SDN), where the entire configuration is provided via virtualized software that is centrally controllable and easily adaptable,
- Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), which runs on containerized apps deployed in Docker containers instead of specialized hardware and appliances,
- Virtual Network Functions (VNF), which ensure that the required NFV can be started quickly, as it is a simple software deployment on commodity hardware.
DevOps simplifies the deployment of 5G networks
Since investments in the manufacturing, installation, and configuration of vast networks of hardware appliances are no longer necessary, entirely new possibilities open up for quickly provisioning and configuring the required infrastructure. This is where DevOps comes into play. For example, to improve interoperability and simplify multi-tenancy, VNF can be containerized and run in a Docker container on a Kubernetes cluster. This is because the hardware resources required to support such a system are significantly lower than with traditional networks. Each system function can also be divided into a microservice, transforming a maze of dependencies into optimized workflows with the exchange of messages between components via APIs.
The use of DevOps models in telecommunications product development is best explained by the exploding popularity of web and mobile interfaces for accessing and managing all types of telecommunications networks and devices, as well as the browser-based services running on this infrastructure. A DevOps approach in 5G networks brings benefits to the entire network operation, enabling the automation of deployment and management of service chains and 5G network segments.
Conclusion:
Since the wave of digitalization has swept across the economy, customer demands for the provision of new services have also exploded. In order to continue to offer their customers added value and thus increase their own competitiveness, companies must respond quickly and flexibly to changing market conditions. To deliver appropriate results, more and more companies are turning to the DevOps method. As demonstrated by the examples of Microsoft, Amazon, and SAP, companies now offer their customers very specific toolboxes consisting of various tools of all kinds to do justice to the cross-functional approach of DevOps and to be able to map the entire lifecycle of software production through to deployment. In addition to the traditionally strongly consumer-oriented industries such as financial services, retail, and telecommunications, the general, cross-sector increase in demand for digital services will mean that companies of all stripes will have to consider methods to optimize the use of resources and development and deployment. And this means they cannot avoid the topic of DevOps.