When you spend your days buried in coding and application development, it’s easy to lose sight of where your work fits into your company’s big picture. That’s especially the case when you work on a small team without much interaction with other departments.
But that’s where DevOps comes in. Both as a philosophy for work and a practical approach to collaboration, teams that work under a DevOps framework often find that projects move faster and more smoothly, and their software turns out cleaner and more effective.
What is DevOps?
Development operations (DevOps) is a set of practices and a framework centered around IT teams working together to improve the outcome of software. The goal is to provide a collaborative experience that draws on different skill sets across multiple disciplines to enhance the quality of the finished product.
The aim of DevOps is to remove work siloes that many developers build around themselves. Instead, teams move forward as a single, unified team to complete projects. This collaboration happens across all stages of the DevOps lifecycle, from initial ideas to observations and feedback. Methodologies like agile and scrum are often used to facilitate DevOps partnerships.
Teams often use tools like continuous delivery software to shorten the development lifecycle using automation and deployment-ready code, allowing them more time to work through other steps and ultimately create better software.
The lifecycle of a DevOps project
Like many life cycles, DevOps doesn’t possess a straightforward beginning-to-end process. It forms an infinite loop of phases that move sequentially from one to the next. Once the “final'' phase is completed with feedback, the loop continues back to the discovery stage.
In this way, DevOps projects always become collaborative and continuous through the development and operational stages. Continuous integration, or CI, is the process where developers refine and merge their code in a centralized repository, which then automates builds and tests once feedback starts coming in and the cycle starts again.
The stages that every DevOps project goes through before starting over again are described here.
- Plan. Once an initial idea has been established, the team starts to decide on milestones for various stages of the project. Developers then break down each milestone into actionable steps.
- Create. Teams can build their software apps with various deployment-ready code programs and automation to shorten the development timeline.
- Test. Here, the DevOps team takes the critical step of making sure the software works as planned. Testing in a sandbox environment means that any errors can be corrected ahead of deployment, giving teams confidence in the success of the final product.
- Deploy. When the software is ready, it can be rolled out to users beyond the DevOps team. This may happen all at once, or in stages that allow for gradual implementation of the new application.
- Observe. DevOps teams should never expect a project to be finished once it’s out in the world. Continually observing the software and its usage has to happen in order to find errors or other vulnerabilities that need updates.
- Feedback. Incorporating real user feedback into the DevOps process means a higher chance of user satisfaction with the end result. Using this criticism, teams return to the planning stage to make further updates and begin the DevOps process again.
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What are the benefits of DevOps?
All collaborative work environments come with challenges, but almost all DevOps teams agree that working under this process has a positive effect on their organization. Here are some of the significant benefits that DevOps teams achieve, all of which lead to better quality applications, energized teams, and happier customers.
Enhanced speed
The undisputed outcome of balanced collaboration is that everything gets done faster. Moving at such a rapid pace throughout software development does have risks, but a larger team with a wide variety of skills means that many of the possible negatives can be mitigated upfront.
Not only does rapid delivery of the final product help the team move on to new projects, but it also keeps the end users happy, too. Faster teams also gain a competitive advantage by increasing the frequency and pace of creating patches to fix bugs or release new features.
Improved reliability
With so many eyes on the software project, catching mistakes at the testing stage becomes easier. This means that once deployment comes around, the final product is set up to perform reliably and result in a positive experience for the end user.
Scalable
Using a cycle of building, testing, and gathering feedback means that teams can scale their products continually. Every new feature added makes the product better, and by incorporating automations into simpler steps, the DevOps team is free to work on more exciting and lucrative parts of development.
Scaling may not be something teams consider in the early stages of DevOps, but adding these practices upfront makes scaling later a much easier process. Well-recorded steps that help the project move ahead also allow teams to create matching test environments on later projects, building greater efficiencies into every stage of the DevOps loop.
Increased security
Even when teams move quickly through the DevOps process, security should always be top of mind. Automation processes keep work safe and protected.
Project management and tracking software ensure that all applications remain compliant with industry regulations at every step, which ultimately saves time because teams don’t need to backtrack to fix compliance issues further down the line.
Continuous delivery software for DevOps
Automated processes are an essential part of successful DevOps. Teams can use continuous delivery software to release products to the market quickly and efficiently.
To be included in the continuous delivery software category, platforms must:
- Connect to code repositories
- Generate a software build
- Help teams define and execute their processes from coding to staging
- Automatically deploy code or maintain code in a deployment-ready state
Below are the top five leading continuous delivery software solutions from G2’s Winter 2024 Grid® Report. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.
1. GitLab
GitLab is a DevOps security platform that allows teams to develop software throughout every stage of the lifecycle.
What users like best:
“GitLab user interface (UI) is very easy to get started and very simple to use. It also allows importing projects from existing repositories such as GitHub, BitBucket, etc. which is very good.”
- GitLab Review, Manav S.
What users dislike:
“The number of features on the UI are a bit overwhelming. Also, the most recent commits take a few seconds to be visible. This might be a bug which can be easily fixed.”
- GitLab Review, Gautami S.
2. GitHub
As one of the world’s leading software development platforms, GitHub makes it possible for teams to share ideas and complete projects while developing their own code through the platform.
What users like best:
“GitHub helps me and my team to collaborate on our project easily. Sharing and syncing of our project is also a plus point for GitHub. We can do our work anywhere at the same time. We can also share our past projects to the public for others to get a reference. Also, we can get some reference from other developers much easier.”
- GitHub Review, Allona F.
What users dislike:
“A big issue with the platform's performance is that it can experience outages and slowdowns during times of high usage. Furthermore, some users may find the user interface perplexing, especially if they are unfamiliar with version control or collaborative technologies.”
- GitHub Review, Neeraj K.
3. CloudBees
CloudBees gives IT, operations, security, and business teams the tools to collaborate in an all-in-one DevOps platform.
What users like best:
“CloudBees provides a powerful continuous integration and continuous delivery/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform that streamlines our software development and deployment processes. It offers a wide range of integrations with popular version control systems, build tools, and deployment platforms. This robust CI/CD capability has allowed us to automate our pipelines, accelerate release cycles, and deliver high-quality software faster.”
- CloudBees Review, Narek T.
What users dislike:
“Cloudbees could improve their CI/CD coverage within their product so that deploying on cloud native platforms like Kubernetes could be extended as well”
- CloudBees Review, Rohit A.
4. Azure DevOps Server
Part of the Microsoft Visual Studio, Azure DevOps Server is an enterprise-level server for teams that want to share code and develop software collaboratively.
What users like best:
“Easy to set up, good support. Robust functionality including CI/CD tightly coupled with tasks.”
- Azure DevOps Server Review, Steve B.
What users dislike:
“Azure DevOps Server can be difficult to deploy and manage, particularly for enterprises without a dedicated IT team. It necessitates a certain degree of technical skill and may necessitate the inclusion of additional resources to ensure seamless functioning. The flexibility to customize is restricted, especially when compared to other self-hosted alternatives.”
- Azure DevOps Server Review, Anna N.
5. CircleCI
CircleCI is one of the world’s largest continuous delivery platforms, where internal teams and the wider development community can collaborate and engineer new code together.
What users like best:
“Straightforward and relatively simple to configure. Very powerful extensibility. A+ documentation and community support. Great UI and command line tools. Very pleased with almost all facets of CircleCI.”
- CircleCI Review, Max M.
What users dislike:
“CircleCI primarily focuses on cloud-based CI/CD workflows, which may not align well with specific local development or on-premises deployment scenarios. This can be a limitation for organizations with specific requirements.”
- CircleCI Review, Sheik A.
Teamwork makes the dream work!
Collaboration is one of the best ways to innovate and build creative projects. Working under a DevOps process encourages and fosters this collective spirit, leading to incredible outcomes for software development teams.
Build applications faster with low-code development platforms designed to get your software to market as quickly as possible.
Holly Landis
Holly Landis is a freelance writer for G2. She also specializes in being a digital marketing consultant, focusing in on-page SEO, copy, and content writing. She works with SMEs and creative businesses that want to be more intentional with their digital strategies and grow organically on channels they own. As a Brit now living in the USA, you'll usually find her drinking copious amounts of tea in her cherished Anne Boleyn mug while watching endless reruns of Parks and Rec.
