What is DevOps and Continuous Integration?

In this session, we give you an introduction to DevOps and Continuous Integration. An hour will only give us the opportunity to scratch the surface of the topic, but we hope that this will trigger your interest and give you a good starting point for further learning. To give you a general understanding of DevOps and Continuous Integration we will discuss:

• What DevOps and Continuous Integration is
• The most commonly used Software products
• The purpose of Automated Testing
• Microservices

WHAT IS DEVOPS?

DevOps is short for ”Development” and ”Operations” and a key purpose of DevOps is to unify the software development processes and the IT Operations to break up the silos.

In Right People Group, we see more and more customers moving from traditional software development to agile software development. DevOps is built on agile principles. However, in general we see that most companies are way further with implementation of Agile principles than with implementation of DevOps.

This is quite a shame, because when we are talking to our independent software developers, we know that one of the greatest barriers for producing excellent results for the customers is rigid deployment processes and lacking cooperation between development and IT Operations.

Below video gives a general introduction to DevOps:

CONTINUOUS DELIVERY AND CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION

Continuous Delivery will mean that fewer people are needed in IT operation roles or at least that the roles are drastically being changed. At the same time it is key for success that the IT Operations staff are actively accepting and pushing the idea. This is one of the reasons why it is hard to implement and requires a strong management backup to succeed.

However, we see from our customers that have succeeded in implementing Continuous Delivery that they are able to achieve agility and that it provides great value for both the business and the quality of the software being built.

Here is a video that explains the fundamentals of Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration:

GITHUB AND JENKINS

Two of the most commonly used software products that are strong enablers for DevOps and Continuous Integration are Jenkins and GitHub. Let’s look at these two below:

GitHub

Jenkins

AUTOMATED TESTING

A fundament for DevOps is automated testing, and for most of our independent software developers it would be unnatural to write code without also making automated tests. In Right People Group we are strong advocates of this, and we want to work with developers that have this mindset.

As you will notice in the video below, the team is from the beginning of the project using automated test for the entire system they are building, and this gives them a great advantage. The same is not easy for large projects that have run for many years and have large amounts of legacy code, and then at a certain point start to use automated testing. In general, our experts in these cases recommend that you start using automated tests going forwards, but that you do not start to implement it for all the previously developed parts of the system.

Below is a conceptual introduction to automated testing. Note that regression test basically means the test that you do to verify that the existing parts of the system are still working:

MICROSERVICES

The architecture concept of Microservices is being more and more adopted among our enterprise customers especially in the financial sector. Microservice architecture is a strong enabler for Continuous Delivery. In general, we see that the customers using Microservice architecture are also rather advanced in their ability to do Continuous Delivery.

Before we get into Microservices let us just take a brief introduction to what a general API is:

MICROSERVICES

The architecture concept of Microservices is being more and more adopted among our enterprise customers especially in the financial sector. Microservice architecture is a strong enabler for Continuous Delivery. In general, we see that the customers using Microservice architecture are also rather advanced in their ability to do Continuous Delivery.

Before we get into Microservices let us just take a brief introduction to what a general API is:

And here we go with a short introduction to Microservices:

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DO YOU NEED A DEVOPS OR CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION CONSULTANT?

Send us an email at info@rightpeoplegroup.com for a CV and hourly rate of an agile expert who matches your project and requirements or read more about our services in this field under DevOps consultant or Continuous Integration consultant.