DevOps

What is DevOps?

DevOps emphasises the removal of barriers to maintain high levels of communication between your development and operations teams. This usually results in a change of work culture within teams.

How can I ensure the effectiveness of my DevOps?

• Select tools that can measure the productivity of DevOps processes for continuous improvement

• Identify relevant metrics before automated processes so errors found without human involvement can be defined

• Establish automated testing procedures to ensure that solutions are tested as early and frequently as possible. The testing process should include the development of acceptable levels of the infrastructure, applications and data

• Ensure constant application monitoring by using appropriate monitoring tools and instrumentation

• Use Infrastructure-as-Code, where the cloud’s API-driven model allows developers and IT personnel to interact with the infrastructure at scale instead of manually booting up and configuring resources

What are the key components of DevOps?

Continuous Integration

Continuous integration is an essential component in effective DevOps practice.

Committing all code in a single repository is a useful foundation that can extend to more advanced practices.

Moreover, if development proceeds without merging back to the mainline frequently enough, there is an increased risk of integration conflicts and failures during the eventual merge.

Deployments

Deployment automation deploys applications across environments used in the development process and the final production environments. This results in faster, frequent and reliable deployments.

Solutions that automate your deployment processes improve the productivity of both the Dev and Ops teams, enabling your team to develop faster, accomplish more, and ultimately build reliable software for the end-user.

Testings

CI/CD helps to automate the process of creating new builds, running tests and deploying them. It reduces the reliance on manual testing and frees up the team to concentrate on other tasks. Over time, CI/CD can also highlight problematic areas for you to enhance.

The chosen CI/CD system should link the source control, build and testing tools used by the team. A dashboard to display build progress and test results is also desirable. Lastly, the system should be configurable to target the desired deployment environment.

How can I benefit from CI/CD?

• Lower costs for you – fewer errors, fewer human hours needed for deployments means lower costs

• Fewer errors made – Removing manual steps reduces human error

• Higher customer satisfaction – frequent updates with new features addresses customer needs sooner and keeps organizations competitive

• Work on what matters – developers can spend time working on new features, not on fixes for manual deployments

• Anyone can deploy – eliminate bottlenecks by removing the need for experts to do the work

• Repeatability – Every deployment deploys the same

What DevOps product is available for my use?

The Singapore Government Tech Stack (SGTS) offers tools for implementing DevOps in public sector agencies.

Last updated 02 June 2022

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