What is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development and IT operations to deliver software solutions more quickly, reliably, and stably. It fundamentally focuses on culture, automation, platform design, and constant feedback loops to enable faster, high-quality service delivery and greater business value.

DevOps speeds the processes by which an idea (like a new software feature, a request for enhancement, or a bug fix) goes from development to deployment in a production environment where it can provide value to the user. This approach requires that development teams and operations teams communicate frequently and approach their work with empathy for their teammates to embrace the mantra “you build it, you run it.” Scalability and flexible provisioning are also necessary. Team members can get the resources they need through self service and automation. Development teams, usually coding in a standard development environment, work closely with IT operations to speed software builds, tests, and releases—without sacrificing reliability.

When making the shift to a DevOps strategy, organizations will have to plan for more frequent changes to code, dynamic infrastructure usage, and better integration with members with different skillsets. It's a big change. DevOps can give you a competitive edge, but it also introduces new ways of working that require new team and management structures.

Take a deep dive into DevOps

DevOps relies on a culture of collaboration that aligns with open source principles and transparent, agile approaches to working. 

The culture of open source software projects can be a blueprint for how to build a DevOps culture. Freely sharing information is the default approach to collaboration in open source communities. It can help to implement cultural changes like promoting transparency in decision-making, encouraging experimentation by eliminating the fear of failure, or implementing a reward system that encourages trust and collaboration. Many organizations look into digital transformation consulting services to support these kinds of initiatives. With the right leadership and incentive programs in place, your DevOps teams can help to facilitate an open culture. 

A DevOps engineer is someone skilled in both IT development and operations. They bring process improvements, tools, and methodologies to the software development lifecycle to increase efficiency and get software from concept to release quickly. DevOps engineers are concerned with reducing repetitive tasks through automation in order to decrease complexity. This closes the gap between actions needed to quickly change an application, and the tasks that maintain its reliability.

Development teams and IT operations teams can have different skills and different goals that work together. Development teams want to introduce new features and capabilities to an application, while operations teams want to preserve the stability of an application once it is released. 

DevOps is all about the unification and automation of processes, and DevOps engineers are instrumental in combining code, application maintenance, and application management. All of these tasks rely on understanding not only development life cycles, but DevOps culture, and its philosophy, practices, and tools. Within an agile environment, developers, system administrators, and programmers can be siloed, working on the same product but not sharing information necessary to ensure value to the user. 

Most professionals embracing DevOps culture combine tools and practices with years of enterprise IT experience. To become a DevOps engineer, you may want to acquire knowledge outside of your skill set—and maybe outside of your team— in order to gain the holistic view needed to become a DevOps engineer. At Red Hat, we have resources to help you and your organization on your way to DevOps. 

See our full list of DevOps courses

Developing modern applications involves different practices. Many teams use agile approaches to software development, which makes DevOps important.

Continuous integration/Continuous delivery

A major outcome of implementing DevOps is a continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline (CI/CD) and frequently obtaining feedback for improvement. CI/CD helps deliver apps to customers frequently and validate software quality with minimal human intervention. 

Specifically, CI/CD introduces ongoing automation and continuous monitoring throughout the lifecycle of applications, from integration and testing phases to delivery and deployment, so you can quickly identify and correct problems and defects. Taken together, these connected practices are often referred to as a "CI/CD pipeline" and are supported by development and operations teams working together in an agile way. CI/CD helps teams build and test changes, add to repositories, and deploy updates quickly and efficiently.

Learn more about CI/CD

Infrastructure as code 

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the managing and provisioning of infrastructure through code instead of through manual processes. IaC is an important part of implementing DevOps practices and CI/CD because it removes the majority of provisioning work from developers through automation. Automation lets an infrastructure withstand the constant code changes that come with DevOps, and allows environments to continuously scale with ease.

Aligning teams through a DevOps approach leads to fewer errors and inconsistencies. IaC allows DevOps teams to use the same description of the application deployment and generates the same environment every time it is used. IaC promotes consistency which is key to DevOps. 

Learn more about IaC

Microservices

DevOps is also about creating new kinds of software better suited to this cadence of continuous delivery. That's why DevOps teams will often build their software using a microservices architecture and link these services together with application programming interfaces (APIs). With microservices, applications are broken down into their smallest components, independent from each other. Instead of a traditional, monolithic, approach to apps, where everything is built into a single piece, microservices are all separated and work together to accomplish the same tasks.

APIs simplify how developers integrate new application components into an existing architecture and help business and IT teams collaborate.  Teams are able to deliver faster by focusing on creating smaller pieces of functionality. They can focus on how microservices and APIs are managed and have a strategy, like agile integration, for bringing it all together. 

Learn more about microservices

Platform engineering

As DevOps becomes accepted across organizations, the need for consistency in tooling, practices, and resource provisioning becomes imperative. Platform engineering has emerged as a complementary practice to help scale DevOps by providing standardized, self-service platforms that increase the productivity of every development team in the organization. 

By emphasizing the standardization of tools and resources through a self-service approach, Platform Engineering strengthens DevOps practices across all development teams, significantly boosting productivity. This leads to faster time-to-market and software solutions that are easier to evolve and adapt over time.

Learn more about platform engineering 

DevOps relies on a collaborative culture that’s best spread across the organization. But that organizational change can come with challenges. These challenges include: 

• Securing team buy-in: One of the biggest challenges is changing organizational mindset. Team members have different ways of working and they can be accustomed to working in one specific way. It can be hard to change minds quickly. The cultural change may take time but can reveal itself as beneficial after a while.
• Architecture complexities: Moving from legacy applications to new architecture like microservices can take significant work. Teams will need to manage a greater number of independent components, which can make it difficult to track dependencies. To help mitigate those challenges, organizations will need the right monitoring and logging systems in place, as well as CI/CD capabilities and automation practices.
• Tool training and reliance: As teams adopt DevOps, they will need to create new training. Timely documentation can ensure better efficiency. Focusing on team structure then tool training can help address the challenges of adopting DevOps.
• Organization challenges: Transitioning from a siloed organization to a DevOps model means bringing together diverse capabilities and skillsets, which requires greater coordination among team members. DevOps teams must continuously learn from one another, and the entire team should share accountability when something goes wrong.

Containers make it easier to move applications between development, testing, and production environments. Using containers lets developers package and isolate their apps with everything they need to run, including application files, runtime environments, dependent libraries and configurations.

The DevOps approach goes hand-in-hand with Linux® containers, which give your team the underlying technology needed for a cloud-native development style. Containers support a unified environment for development, delivery, integration, and automation. DevOps speeds up how an application goes from development to deployment. At its core, DevOps relies on automating routine operational tasks and standardizing environments across an app’s lifecycle. 

And Kubernetes is the modern way to automate Linux container operations. Kubernetes helps you easily and efficiently manage clusters running Linux containers across public, private, or hybrid clouds. 

Learn more about containers

For DevOps to be effective, an organization needs to think about security at every step of an application's lifecycle. This emphasis on security led to the rise of a related discipline called DevSecOps. DevSecOps merges development, security, and operations. In collaboration with DevOps, security is a shared responsibility integrated from end to end.

DevOps processes such as CI/CD security can be used to safeguard code pipelines with automated checks and testing to prevent vulnerabilities in software delivery. CI/CD automates and embeds security checks early in the development process, ensuring rapid feedback regarding potential vulnerabilities. This facilitates a proactive approach to security throughout the lifecycle of the application.

By adopting shift left and shift right security principles and continuous testing methods, teams are able to evaluate and ensure quality and performance of products and features throughout the DevOps process. Automated testing provides developer-friendly guardrails that reduce errors at the build and deploy stages, as well as at runtime.

Learn more about DevSecOps

Red Hat has a range of products and tools that support your DevOps processes and success. If your operations are going to keep pace with rapid development cycles, they’ll need to use highly flexible platforms and treat their infrastructure like dev teams treat code. 

Red Hat® OpenShift® is well-positioned to provide DevOps teams, platform engineers, and SREs with the features and capabilities that allow for CI/CD, security guardrails, zero-trust security architecture, and organizational compliance requirements. OpenShift together with Red Hat Developer Hub, provides engineering teams with the tools they need to effectively build and manage an internal developer platform (IDP) and create the project templates, documentation, and workflows needed to build “Golden Paths.” 

Platform provisioning and deployment can be simplified through automation. Site reliability engineering (SRE) takes these manually operations tasks and manages them using software and automation. An SRE approach can further support the goals of a DevOps team. Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform is a comprehensive, integrated platform that helps SRE teams automate for velocity, collaboration, and growth—offering security and support across the technical, operational, and financial functions of the enterprise.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is also a reliable platform that ensures that scaling and automation won’t fail when you need it most. To reduce complexity of managing Linux at scale, image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux lets DevOps teams use the same container-native tools and techniques to manage everything from applications to the underlying operating system (OS).

To help build security into your DevOps practices, Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain can help. It helps you code, build, deploy, and monitor for software delivery that is compliant with your organization’s security practices. With integrated features like Trusted Profile Analyzer, Red Hat can help eliminate potential security issues early and throughout the software development life cycle. 

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