There are a lot of questions application development and operations teams ask themselves on a daily basis. From “how can we release on time?” to “how can we add new features into the release seamlessly?” Luckily, the same simple answer can apply to each of these: Embrace DevOps.

DevOps is not a technology, but the practice of operations and development engineers working together through the entire life cycle, from design and development to production support. The practice has roots that go back as far as 2007, but DevOps truly began making a positive impact on enterprise IT teams in 2014 and is still expanding as an accepted practice in the IT community.

In a recent survey from the IBM Institute for Business Value, 42 percent of respondents identified collaboration across the technology ecosystem (DevOps) as a technology trend most impact to competitiveness. But in the same survey, 73 percent replied that organizations are under prepared to take advantage of that trend.

In preparation for DevOps implementation, there are a few key terms that organizations should be familiar with:

• Continuous Delivery (CD) is a set of processes and practices to radically remove waste from your software production process, enable faster delivery of high-quality functionality and set up a rapid and effective feedback loop between your business and users.
• Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice requiring developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day. Each check-in is then verified by an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems early.
• Configuration Management establishes and maintains consistent settings and functional attributes for a system, including tools for system administration tasks such as IT infrastructure automation.
• Build Automation tools or frameworks allow source code to be automatically compiled into releasable binaries, ensuring individual pieces of code behave as expected.

At Reliable Software, we work with customers to facilitate implementation of a DevOps culture within organizations using several software tools tailored to each company’s specific needs. These include GIT for version control, Bit Bucket for versioning, Docker for continuous deployment and Ansible for server configuration management.

If you are interested in learning more about how DevOps can help your organization develop, deploy and manage applications seamlessly and efficiently, contact us today.