The DevOps continuum showcases the different aspects of DevOps, as shown in the below diagram that has horizontal and vertical axes. The horizontal axis at the bottom shows the perception of the people about DevOps to primarily focused on culture or tools. Many people believe that DevOps focuses on culture more than automation tools, and on the other hand, some people tend to value tools over culture.
The vertical axis portrays the three levels of the DevOps delivery chain. They are as follows.
- Continuous Integration: Application code integration to the product in iteration.
- Continuous Delivery: Delivery of the application code to the Quality Assurance team for testing.
- Continuous deployment: Deployment of the application code on target server or machine to run the product in various environments.
The DevOps community refers to organizations such as Amazon, Etsy, Flicker, IMVU, Netflix, Pinterest, and Google. These organizations practice DevOps culture and use automation tools. We can’t have DevOps without tools, and the automation tools cannot survive in the market without a strong supporting culture. DevOps culture is a blend of the tools, culture, and sense of evolution over the period. The main focus of the DevOps culture is to encourage collaboration between the development and operations team and improve software delivery through automation tools.
DevOps Continuum is an enterprise-scale continuous delivery platform that has used to speed up software development, reducing the software risk, and ensuring the quality of complex software product post-deployment. It has been designed to get easily integrated with the existing DevOps tools such as GIT, Jenkins, Bit Bucket, JIRA, etc., to minimize any disruption to the infrastructure. Simple integration of the DevOps tool helps the processes of the product development lifecycle to get executed in a single, and centralized platform. It allows the different teams like the development team, operations, testing, etc. to be empowered with real-time insight to improve product delivery speed, bottlenecks elimination, and reduce the product deployment costs.
DevOps Continuum Goals
DevOps Continuum is about the DevOps culture and the use of required automation tools to Improve the collaboration among all stakeholders from planning through product delivery and automation of the delivery process. The following are the goals of DevOps culture.
- Improve deployment frequency: The use of DevOps tools helps to create a CICD pipeline where the building of the application code, running of the automated test cases, and the deployment takes place in the sequence. Each of the steps in the workflow provides the transparency of the logs and the progress.
- Achieve faster time to market: Use of the automation tools and integration of these tools with other testing and deployment tools help to speed up the product development that ultimately reduces the time to deliver the software to the market.
- The lower failure rate of new releases: The modern automation tools have equipped to provide the complete insight of the application health, and visual logs representation depicting the code deployment or build failure or success. It reduces the rate of product failure of the new releases as tools are very good in tracking the flaws in the release over releases.
- Shorten the lead time between fixes: The use of automation tools and the integration of these tools to form a product delivery pipeline reduces the lead time between the product fixes.
- Improve mean time to recovery: DevOps culture and automation tools together help to improve mean time to recovery.
The developers develop code every day that need to build for the testing. The automated testing ensures the code is working as expected, and it is ready to get deployed and released to a small number of users. The newly developed code has been monitored for a short period to make sure that there are no unforeseen problems with the code. After ensuring the code stability, the new code gets multiplied to the remaining users. Most of these steps in the DevOps culture, after planning and development, are accomplished without human intervention.
Overcoming the Challenges in DevOps Continuum
Several challenges need to be countered in DevOps Continuum to maintain a smooth DevOps culture as follows.
- Proper training and focus: It is very important to have a vision that comes through proper training and focus. Lack of vision may result in not implementing the DevOps culture in the right direction which may end up in no gain to the organization. Organizations need to maintain the proper guidance and training to make people the real need of adopting the latest culture.
- Bringing teams together: It is a proven fact that when various teams work together, the overall productivity reaches a peak. The collaboration among the development team, testing team, and operations team, etc. help to bring the complete idea of the product on the table and there will be time-saving due to miscommunication, the product could be built accurately in the first attempt, etc. Breaking the cultural barriers and making various teams work together can pave the way for business expansion and huge profits to the organizations.
- Flexible tool orchestration options: The tools orchestration is very important to set up a delivery pipeline. Each automation tool that qualifies for the DevOps has its specifications and compatibility described. We should make a wise choice of the tools to omit the problem of tool integration. Emphasize using the tools which are easy to integrate with other tools instead of using the tools which have integration limitations and lack flexibility
- Automation tools are equipped to provide the analytical data that can be put into one central repository. Such tools that can help in the creation of useful reports and metrics about the percentage change in customer ticket volume, deployment frequency, percentage change in user volume, percentage of passed and failed deployments over the time.
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed the DevOps Continuum, goals, and the challenges that are required to overcome to build a working DevOps culture.
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