What is DevOps automation?

DevOps automation allows development teams to reduce the possibility of human error and ship software faster by replacing manual tasks with automated processes. For example, continuous integration and continuous delivery automates the build, testing, and deployment stages of the DevOps lifecycle.

What is the difference between DevOps and SRE?

Both DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) enhance the software development lifecycle by improving automation, collaboration, and monitoring. The main difference is that DevOps teams build and update software while SRE teams work with software that’s already in production to make sure it functions correctly and meets service level commitments.

What is DevOps?

Q: What is the DevOps model?

Since every DevOps implementation is unique to the company’s business needs, there really is no one-size-fits-all DevOps model . However, the core philosophies of DevOps include the breaking down of silos, and the ideas that everyone should take responsibility for a product and work together as a team across all parts of the SDLC.

DevOps methodology, people shift the way they work and collaborate. From culture change to automation with continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), let’s explore how DevOps teams develop shared context, expertise, tooling, and roles to ship better products.
How DevOps was created: Silos to shared workflows
DevOps sets a new standard for how we build software. Before the mid-2000s, developers, IT operations, and security teams typically worked in silos and followed a linear process:
- Developers wrote code, packaged the application with documentation, and shipped it to QA.
- The QA team tested the application and handed it off to the production operations team.
- The operations team deployed the software to production and managed the software’s uptime and stability—with little or no direct interaction with the development team.
- The security team only checked code for vulnerabilities after deployment.
- If someone reported an issue, the entire process started over again.
This linear approach to software development was slow and frustrating for everyone involved. Then in 2008, system administrator Patrick Debois and software developer Andrew Shafer created a working group to help bridge the gap between operations and development teams. Their best practices started the journey toward the DevOps processes we know today.
recent research shows that using DevOps methodologies and principles like automation drive productivity and improve the developer experience.
DevOps makes software development faster, friendlier, and more collaborative. Engineers who work on DevOps teams focus on their goals, prioritize work-life balance, and get more time for the projects they care about. This type of satisfaction builds on what we know from organizational psychology: Teams do their best work when they’re personally invested in the outcome.
- Improved productivity: collaborative culture with improved communication.
We’ve gone from over 30 siloed software engineering groups to a largely cohesive team. By using standards and automation, the DevOps journey is now three steps.
Denis CantyMcKesson Labs / Vice President of Developer Services and Technology Labs
How DevOps works
The DevOps lifecycle
The DevOps lifecycle spans all aspects of software development. DevOps teams collaborate continuously and share tools and responsibilities across all lifecycle phases to efficiently build and ship software.
Four phases of the DevOps lifecycle
Idea
Teams gather requirements and feedback and start sketching out the resources they’ll need. DevOps teams focus on continuous planning—plans that can be updated frequently, even daily. To build out roadmaps and track progress towards their goals, teams leverage project management tools everyone can access and use.
Ideation stack: GitHub Issues and Project Boards. Learn more about deployment
Learn
Software may be out in the world, but the work isn’t over. Operations teams keep an eye on releases with monitoring tools that measure performance and monitor the impact of code changes. They ensure stability and uptime, gather customer feedback, and stay in close contact with developers to push required fixes and address incidents faster.
Observability stack: Netdata, Lightstep, New Relic, App Dynamics, Sentry, Raygun, Honeycomb, Splunk
Automation at every step
DevOps emphasizes automation alongside collaboration for quicker releases. Automating tasks via CI/CD in a DevOps pipeline accelerates software development and deployment and helps ensure high-quality output with testing, reporting, and monitoring. CALMS often use these best practices as benchmarks for a successful DevOps culture.
Collaboration
Explore American Airlines

The access, sharing, and collaboration that happens when we’re all one organization is fantastic.
Cynthia Payne, Vice President of IT App Services at Nationwide

DevOps and DevSecOps

What is DevSecOps?

Like development and operations, DevSecOps integrates automated security testing into every part of DevOps culture, tooling, and processes. DevSecOps or “shifting left.” GitHub has always considered good DevOps to mean DevSecOps, and GitHub tools make it easier for DevOps teams to include security at every step of the SDLC.

Using automated security tools, developers find and address security vulnerabilities as they code instead of waiting for security teams to address them after deployment. By empowering developers to take responsibility for security throughout the DevOps lifecycle, DevSecOps allows development, operations, and security teams to find and remediate security issues faster.

You fix it and you move forward, because guess what? It takes you a minute to solve that security issue in development when it could potentially take you days in production.
Shamal Siwan, Lead DevOps Engineer/Solutions Architect at California Department of Technology

DevOps products

Each phase of the DevOps lifecycle has unique considerations that one or more products can help solve. Organizations might invest in building out a collection of tools to use in its DevOps practice, called a “DevOps Toolchain” to address each phase of the lifecycle. The most successful DevOps organizations will have these types of tools to help them deliver higher-quality software faster. GitHub, integrate with the organization’s DevOps toolchain and empower product teams to collaborate throughout the DevOps lifecycle. They include productivity features like GitHub Advanced Security help ensure software security through every phase of the SDLC. For example, GitHub Advanced Security scans code as it’s created to help developers secure their code in minutes, watches their repositories, and notifies them of secrets issued by more than 45 leading secret providers, and helps turn security best practices into better development processes.

Start building your DevOps workflow

Whether you’re ready to dive in or still have questions, we’ve got you covered.

DevOps model. However, the core philosophies of DevOps include the breaking down of silos, and the ideas that everyone should take responsibility for a product and work together as a team across all parts of the SDLC.

What is the difference between DevOps and DevSecOps?

DevSecOps builds on DevOps by integrating automated security testing into every part of DevOps culture, tooling, and processes. This helps developers find and address security vulnerabilities as they code instead of waiting for security teams to address them after deployment. By empowering developers to take responsibility for security throughout the DevOps lifecycle, DevSecOps allows development, operations, and security teams to find and remediate security issues faster.

What is considered good DevOps?

Good DevOps combines “development” and “operations” to bring teams together to deliver better software, faster. Best practices to benchmark DevOps success include collaboration, automation of repetitive tasks, and transparency, such as ongoing feedback and open access to repositories.

What does a DevOps Engineer do?

A DevOps Engineer plays an important role in the DevOps lifecycle by continuously managing team communications and designing and implementing strategies. In addition to code-related tasks, the DevOps Engineer is responsible for solving issues related to testing, monitoring, release management, and operational planning.

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What is the difference between DevOps and DevSecOps?

What is considered good DevOps?

What does a DevOps Engineer do?