Every man and his dog have heard about DevOps. But if you ask somebody what is it, you might hear something about a combination of developers and IT operations or even Quality Assurance (QA) engineers. What is it in reality?

Well, DevOps is an approach or even methodology of efficient software development and strong collaboration between teams working on the project. That’s why DevOps is called a philosophy sometimes. Besides the newest tools and practices, DevOps culture provides a lot of work with teams. We need to notice that DevOps doesn’t link different teams in one, it only establishes communication between specialists.

Why DevOps services so efficient and what can they bring to the project? 

How DevOps can change the project?

There are two main principles of DevOps transformation. The first is called Infrastructure as Code or IaC. Before the DevOps, software deployment was much harder. IaC allows DevOps engineer to create the environment and put the parameters of this environment to the textual file called a manifest. Such a file is written in the descriptive language and describes some conditions. If a developer needs another condition, he/she can change some parameters and automatically receive the new deployment environment. Thus, IaC simplifies the work of developers and IT operations/DevOps. 

Another remarkable DevOps feature is CI/CD – Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. It allows automating testing and deployment processes. CI/CD usually is depicted as an infinite loop. With CI/CD, developers write code in small parts that are tested automatically and deployed immediately after successful testing.

Also, DevOps provide continuous monitoring, logging and analysis. Monitoring allows to track errors, user flow and other important moments. Logs store the information and then DevOps engineer can analyze it and make some changes in the system, remove bottlenecks, etc.

In addition, we should mention the teamwork that DevOps provides. DevOps as culture provides strong communication between teams of developers, IT operations and QA engineers. Only good collaboration can bring great DevOps transformation and remarkable results in the work process.

Is DevOps the demanded area nowadays?

The answer is – totally yes. It makes software development and infrastructure management more efficient and profitable for the business. DevOps provide faster releases, it means end-users fill faster get the product and business faster will receive the profit. Also, such an approach allows making fast updates and changes if needed.

DevOps evolves all the time. There are a lot of open-source and paid tools for DevOps engineers. IT domain field grows very fast, so there is always something new to learn and implement. Also, if some technology doesn’t stack it means the technology update is demanded. The technical growth of the DevOps culture leads to the evolving DevOps engineer specialization. There are new specialties for DevOpses like AIOps who works with Artificial Intelligence or SecOps who works with the security issues.

 As you can see, DevOps does not stand still, so it is quite demanded. Also, there are a lot of companies that work with old technologies and methodologies that need transformation. You might think, DevOps will be unnecessary when all the companies provide it. But new tools and technologies arise almost every day, so DevOps engineer will always have a job. 

Conclusion: so, what’s the future for DevOps?

DevOps exists for more than ten years and there is no declining trend, so it is growing all the time. Old technologies are evolving and new are arising. There are more and more tools for DevOps and DevOps engineer needs to develop his/her skills all the time. Also, there are new specializations for DevOps engineers like AIOps, SecOps and others.  So the future of DevOps is quite bright and successful.