DevOps is short for Development and Operations. It is an approach to delivering software solutions in a continuous manner based on lean (minimizing waste of resources, reducing the number of defects, etc.) and agile practices. DevOps help manage complexities of Enterprise applications by creating a collaborative environment with participants coming not only from Development and Operations, but also from Business, QA, and other stakeholder groups. In other words, DevOps is not only about Development and Operations! The DevOps practice has been popularized by organizations adopting the Cloud-as-a-Service computing model.

To rapidly deliver reliable, scalable micro and macro services that are critical for the business time to market and value. The technical benefits are continuous delivery, reduction in component complexity and agility in problem resolution. The business benefits are agility in the delivery of business benefits, increased stability and more focus on competitive advantage, rather than “keeping the lights on”.

The demand for professionals with the right set of DevOps skills is growing rapidly because businesses get great results from DevOps. As DevOps is slowly taking over the IT scene, it’s imperative that IT professionals have an understanding of it before just jumping right into it.

• Shift Left. DevOps goes hand-in-hand with Agile software development methodologies. This places emphasis on rapid identification of defects.
• Competitive Advantage. Faster
• Technology Enabled Business. Time to market and value
• Agility. Any developer or server environment should be able to be reloaded in a short amount of time, e.g. 4 hours from request.
• Happy people. Effective DevOps implementations incur less daily stress and remove constant fire drills. This converts to better customer experience, both internally and externally.

The role of a DevOps engineer is not just one job role or position. DevOps engineers are involved in the continuous development, integration and delivery of products and processes.

They can be developers who get interested in deployment and network operations, or maybe sysadmins who have a desire for scripting and coding, and want to move into the development side where they can progress in the planning of test and deployment.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) supports DevOps by providing services to build, store and deploy applications, as well as configuration management tools. AWS offers some amazing built-in tools that work with DevOps.

Some of the top DevOps tools are:

• GIT
• JENKINS
• SELENIUM
• DOCKER
• PUPPET
• CHEF
• ANSIBLE
• NAGIOS
• ELK STACK
• SPLUNK

1. Identify your business drivers
2. Get educated
3. Articulate DevOps’ value proposition
4. Define one or more scenarios of software delivery with DevOps techniques
5. Produce a roadmap
6. Gain stakeholder buy-in
7. Establish governance for risk mitigation
8. Establish a core team
9. Invest in infrastructure (not applicable if you operate in the Cloud)
10. Pilot
11. Enterprise roll-out

From the recently released 2017 State of DevOps Report, high performing organizations that effectively utilize DevOps principles achieve:

• 46x more frequent software deployments than their competitors.
• 96x faster recovery from failures.
• 440x faster lead time for changes.
• Higher levels of customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.