Ensuring continuous delivery with DevOps

DevOps focuses on development, operations and testing, all working in close proximity to accomplish rapid, iterative development and deployment. ‘Continuous’ is a word which is associated with every phase of DevOps. That can be Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Testing or Continuous Delivery. 

Continuous delivery aims at automating the full software delivery life cycle until the last preproduction phase, so that the software can be deployed into production any time. Continuous delivery does not mean every new feature is deployed as soon as possible, rather it means that every new feature is deployable at any time. Continuous delivery is mandatory while continuous deployment is optional. Focusing on continuous delivery increases the capacity of releasing changes.

The concept of continuous delivery has got a lot of focus nowadays. A number of factors contribute to this. 

-      The increasing business pressure for faster delivery of new functionalities. 

-      Huge advances in the field of automated tools such as data center automation, test automation, cloud and virtualization and database management. 

-      The possibility of applying continuous delivery techniques to large organizations.

DevOps engineers perform multiple functions in supporting software development and quality assurance. They configure test server, build servers for supporting continuous integration and automate code merges, write custom scripts etc. 

Implementing DevOps successfully brings an organization one step closer to continuous delivery. It is the idea that as soon as a feature is ready, it can be deployed into production. Some of the attributes of continuous delivery are as follows:

-      Releasing work rapidly allows to gather feedback early as well. This to a great extent, helps in improving the quality of the product.

-      It helps to reduce risks. Larger deployments are more susceptible to errors and risks rather than small incremental builds. These small builds can be checked thoroughly during each release. 

-      New features can be released early by analyzing the responsiveness of the user.

-      This form of development and delivery goes very well with the present day competition in the market.

DevOps and its inclination towards continuous delivery is shaping up the business landscape for the future. Continuous delivery is about applying a scientific method to software development life cycle. DevOps is a journey towards better engineering and delivery principles. Continuous delivery is only a process, DevOps is the bigger cultural shift. Continuous delivery can be considered to be a reference book to be used for solving certain software delivery problems.

         

Conclusion

Any large organization with separately operating departments, has a tough time delivering software on time due to poor communication and an underlying cultural divide. DevOps works on this factor and advocates on working together and focusing on a goal collectively rather than optimizing individual domains. The most important factor here is for people to care about their work and try to make the process better. The teams need to come together, evaluate hypothesis and experiments for getting better at what they have been already doing.