What is DevOps? A refresher
DevOps stands for Development and Operations. The term is a combination of:
- Dev: Software development which includes coding, building and testing.
- Ops: IT Operations which includes deployment, infrastructure, maintenance and stability.
DevOps originated from the growing need to connect the silos between software development and IT operations. The adoption of agile practices in software development teams enabled developers to release software faster and more reliably. As developers sped up their processes, the Operations side of the organization started to struggle with the impact of agile on deployment, maintenance and stability. In essence, the two teams were no longer in sync.
And so DevOps was born as a way of bringing these two teams together: developers and IT Operations, to work as one team and share the same methodologies for the greater good.
What is DevOps today?
DevOps is a combination of work methodologies, tools, and cultural practices that shorten lengthy development processes, facilitate continuous delivery with high software quality.
It’s also a culture that encourages team collaboration; development, QA, and operations teams work hand in hand throughout the software lifecycle to deliver in a rapidly changing market.
How does DevOps work?
DevOps automates repetitive tasks such as testing, building, deployment and infrastructure provisioning. It couples continuous integration and delivery/deployment by merging code into a shared repository with automated tests and quickly delivering code to a production-like environment. And finally, it nurtures monitoring and feedback gathering. Development teams can harness all these benefits by adopting CI/CD tools to their everyday practice.
What are the benefits of DevOps?
- Delivers software faster, better, and more reliably to end-users.
- Automates repetitive and manual tasks to reduce delays.
- Breaks down silos between development and operations, and encourages communication and collaboration for common goals.
- Thrives for improved customer satisfaction by frequent feature updates and by collecting customer feedback.
- Allows developers to focus on new features and spend less time firefighting.
- Integrates security practices into development.
Agile and DevOps
Agile helps to build good software through fast iterations and collecting frequent customer feedback. It brings together business and development to continuously plan and deliver new features and functionality to customers.
DevOps builds on agile and provides a wider scope of collaboration across teams and tasks beyond development. It brings IT operations into the picture to test and deploy software and maintain it for the best performance possible through frequent monitoring.
How does DevOps apply to Mobile development?
Mobile app development and DevOps are a match made in heaven. Why? Because mobile app development has unique, day-to-day challenges which can be best supported by DevOps practices. Some of these challenges can be:
Rapid time to market is mission-critical
App users' expectations keep rising. They expect instant updates, a steady stream of new features, and zero bugs. DevOps smooths the path by helping to automate the process and by bringing both development and operations together to remove any bottlenecks, delivering updates faster with less risk.
Catching issues early is crucial
Fixing issues live on mobile apps is not ideal. DevOps teams can ensure consistent performance by automating testing and monitoring at every step of the process.
It's all about collaboration
Mobile development involves many different teams and platforms. Collaboration is key to keeping things moving and to removing roadblocks.
Errors and mistakes can be costly
The goal of DevOps is to ensure consistency, traceability, and quality in the pipeline at every stage so errors are caught before they ever reach users.
What is CI/CD?
CI/CD is the short form of Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery. As the name implies, its automated development and delivery process aims to ship code changes quicker and more safely:
- Continuous integration helps push code to a shared repo and ensure bugs are caught early through automated tests.
- Continuous Delivery makes sure the latest mobile app release is delivered to the required platforms and app stores promptly.
How does CI/CD help mobile development?
Automation is one of the key principles of DevOps. CI/CD automates repetitive, manual tasks such as building, testing, code signing, deploying, and collecting feedback.
CI/CD automation saves developer time, enables quick and frequent releases, while drastically reducing the risk of manual error.
CI/CD encourages developers to commit their code to a shared repository which reduces code conflicts and helps development and operations teams work toward the same goals.
CI/CD pipelines and workflows ensure stable infrastructure provisioning throughout development, testing and production.
CI/CD’s automated pipelines help deploy to any mobile platform or app store which is a huge bonus in today’s complicated app store environment.
If there’s an issue, CI/CD pipelines can quickly revert to a previous stable release to prevent lengthy downtime.
Why is Bitrise the best CI/CD solution for Mobile DevOps?
In a highly competitive mobile environment, it is crucial to keep pace with iOS, Android, and other platform changes, and deliver the best user experience possible in the shortest amount of time. Bitrise is a full-stack, vertically integrated Mobile DevOps Platform that unites the tools, processes, and data that development teams need to produce world-class mobile apps.
Bitrise automates the entire mobile development lifecycle: coding, testing, releasing, deploying and monitoring to get your app to the market faster.
- It offers a wide range of automations to choose from: automatically configured pipelines, Steps and Workflows, notifications and triggers to create the best CI process to your exact needs, quickly.
- It automates application code signing for multiple platforms, which is often a challenging task for iOS and Android.
- It runs automated unit and UI tests and involves testing/distribution platforms like Testflight, Google Play Internal Testing, or Firebase App Distribution.
- It also integrates with other popular tools like Sentry, Firebase Crashlytics, Jira, Trello, and Slack, to name a few.
- It uses virtual machines to run your builds ensuring maximum confidentiality. Once the build finishes, the virtual machines return to their original clean state. With Bitrise’s custom Enterprise Build Platform, you can control how, when, and where you want to run your builds.
- It has webhooks to run builds/tests automatically on every commit to a branch.
- It has over 420 integrations to use, available on a simple and intuitive UI.
- Its out-of-the box DevSecOps offers a high level of security and compliance.
- Its mobile CI/CD cloud infrastructure cuts significant build machine costs. Bitrise takes care of maintaining all the infrastructure (including tools and visualization).
- It has faster build times and QA cycles and an overall better developer experience to reduce manual config and maintenance.
Would like to see Bitrise in action? Sign up for a free trial here.
