DevOps Methodology | Goals, Principles & Process

Wondering what DevOps Methodology is all about? We will explain what it is, how it works, and the principles and processes that make it successful.

What is DevOps Methodology?

DevOps methodology is a development process where Development and IT Operations collaborate throughout the lifecycle to facilitate faster deployment of reliable software products.

Building a DevOps methodology

DevOps is a school of thought that brings together development and operations teams throughout the entire lifecycle of a project. Rather than having development “throw code over the wall” for operations to handle, the teams collaborate in everything from design to keeping the code running in production. By collaborating, operations will ensure that new code is ready to be supported, reducing incidents and speeding up deployment frequency.

A DevOps methodology is a collection of practices and procedures that achieves the benefits of DevOps. A good methodology moves code smoothly through each stage of the lifecycle, without information getting trapped in silos. It should break down what’s required of the people involved in each stage, and what they need to pass on to the people in the next stage.

Setting up a good DevOps methodology is an investment. While engineers acclimatize to new processes and form new habits, your development might actually be slower. However, the benefits outweigh the cost of initial investment.

Integrating DevOps into your model

The DevOps methodology is compatible with your existing structure. You won’t need to scrap everything and start over. Instead, you can build upon your current practices by adding communication flows between teams.

For example, you can still use most of the processes you have in place for deploying new code. When you upgrade to a DevOps methodology, you’ll need to add opportunities for development and operations teams to contribute to the deployment process. By looping them into the deployment stage, you’ll ensure that the new code won’t cause issues in production, and work to achieve continuous deployment.

DevOps methodology and SRE

DevOps and SRE have similar goals, with different ways of achieving them. Despite these differences, the DevOps methodology can fit nicely into an SRE system. SRE can be seen as an implementation of DevOps. DevOps has certain steps and requirements laid out, and SRE can provide the specific processes and tools to achieve them.

For example, DevOps requires new development projects to be informed of the concerns of operation teams. If there’s an incident that occurs in production due to a choice made in development, the development team needs to know about it. SRE provides a way to achieve this, with incident retrospectives. These documents provide the learning to improve from the incident to the rest of the organization.

DevOps methodology and Agile

It’s also possible to have a hybrid DevOps and Agile solution. As you proceed through the DevOps methodology, each stage requires aspects of the project to be completed. Agile provides a process of ensuring completion. Agile focuses on optimizing completing specific tasks, while DevOps handles the overall progression of the project.

When developing new code, Agile can support DevOps for efficiency. Your DevOps methodology will help the design be more robust by looping in operations and other teams. Then, the Agile methodology breaks down the project into sprints, which it efficiently guides teams through.

The basics of the DevOps methodology

DevOps is all about moving code through the DevOps lifecycle efficiently and reliably. Here are the stages of the lifecycle and how the DevOps methodology supports them:

1. Development - DevOps incorporates feedback from operations to build more robust and supportable code
2. Integration - DevOps removes stumbling blocks from integration, allowing you to integrate continuously with minimized toil
3. Testing - your methodology allows you to automatically test throughout the lifecycle, keeping your project moving without manual intervention
4. Monitoring - DevOps methodology uses monitoring tools to have monitoring data inform development throughout the entire lifecycle
5. Feedback - the frequent deployments of your DevOps methodology allows continuous opportunities for feedback to improve your project
6. Deployment - DevOps uses tools like container orchestration to make frequent, small deployments with little manual intervention
7. Operations - once code is deployed, DevOps supports the code through inevitable incidents. It ensure you learn everything you can when things go wrong

Each step is enhanced by building a methodology with tools and processes. Your code will move more efficiently and consistently through the stages, resulting in more reliable code deployed more quickly.

Blameless can help make your DevOps tooling more robust. Our incident response tools will mitigate incidents and help you make the most of them. To see how, check out a demo.