DevOps Definition and Ramifications

The definition of DevOps has different meanings to many people. I’ve seen people define DevOps as “collaborations of developers and operations,” “treating your code as infrastructure,” “using automation,” “using kanban,”“a toolchain approach,” “culture,”-  a variety of seemingly loosely related items.

However, according to Wikipedia, “DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development and IT operations. It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. DevOps is complementary with Agile software development; several DevOps aspects came from the Agile methodology.”

As Wikipedia’s definition above, DevOps is related to Agile practices, and have several ramifications, such as:

• TestOps
• DataOps
• DevSecOps
• MLOps
• System Administration
• Site-Reliability Engineering

All these ramifications tries to solve problems by combining Agile Development and IT Operations by relying on the same culture-shifting, bringing Development and Operations teams together under the DevOps umbrella.

DevOps is not a toolset

We shouldn’t think of DevOps as a set of tools, the idea behind this is that even if you have the coolest toolset, but if there’s no knowledge about sharing or it doesn’t bring teams together, you aren’t being DevOps at the end of the day.

Even though DevOps isn’t a toolset, we do love them, (don’t we?) That’s the reason why I want to present Azure DevOps Services.

Azure DevOps Services

Azure DevOps is a rich solution that provides development services to support your teams to plan work, collaborate on code development and build and deploy applications, supporting culture and set of processes that bring not only Developers and IT Operations teams together, but also Project Managers and contributors to complete the software solution.

With Azure DevOps, you can work in the cloud or on-premises using Azure DevOps Server.

Azure DevOps provides the following services:

• Azure Repos – provides Git repositories or Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) for source control of your code.
• Azure Pipelines – provides build and release services to support continuous integration and delivery of your applications.
• Azure Boards – delivers a suite of Agile tools to support planning and tracking work, code defects, and issues using Kanban and Scrum methods.
• Azure Test Plans – provides several tools to test your apps, including manual/exploratory testing and continuous testing.
• Azure Artifacts – allows teams to share packages such as Maven, npm, NuGet, and more from public and private sources and integrate package sharing into your pipelines.

In the next post, we’ll continue our adventure on Azure DevOps, digging into each of the services.

Have any questions? Want to learn more? Get in Touch