Terms Every Devops Pro Needs to Know

Fully implementing a DevOps culture is a demanding endeavor for even the best-prepared organization. In addition to developing new workflows and processes to integrate the development and operations functions of the team and break down silos, the team needs to be up-to-speed with some key terminology to ensure that best practices are being followed.

Here are some of the key terms and why each of them is important to your DevOps team.

Agile

Many view DevOps as a development upon the Agile software and business development philosophy.

Agile, like DevOps, calls for short, iterative development cycles that allow product managers to better pivot the software to the often rapidly changing conditions of the market and user requirements.

It’s important for DevOps teams to be familiar with some of Agile’s most prominent processes, such as Scrum, as those already familiar with them may want the new DevOps workflows to jive with what’s already in place.

Regression Testing

Another important DevOps functions for teams to be aware of is regression testing. Because DevOps envisions striving towards a continually more iterative release cycle, the importance of this QA functioned is increased as teams become more DevOps-efficient.

Regression testing, which can be run both as functional tests and unit tests, should be done early in the development cycle as well as after each major build. We tried and loved Testim.io for automating regression.

Vulnerabilities

Vulnerabilities are potentially dangerous backdoors into your software that a hacker could exploit.

As ‘dev’ and ‘ops’ work in increasingly close alignment, it’s important that they are synchronized on the effort to conduct effective quality assurance on all code produced. They should also be able to scan any open-source platforms used in the development process for common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs).

Like everything else in operations, this function is pervaded with automation platforms to make the process more effective and begin checking code for potential security vulnerabilities even before it enters the test environment.

As DevOps envisions the two departments working in ongoing unison to bring continuous improvements to the codebase to market, it’s important that this becomes an ongoing and prioritized effort.

Provisioning

A major function of DevOps is streamlining the development and testing processes. Provisioning (setting up systems for new users) is particularly important to the smooth functioning of this process, particularly as operations scale and more team members come aboard.
DevOps teams frequently harness the power and scalability of automated system configuration management tools to make this happen smoothly.

Deployment Management

Release and deployment management (RDM) is another core function of the DevOps teams.

After bugs have been ironed out and the codebase becomes more robust, teams need to begin planning a scheduled and controlled manner of moving the content into the testing and finally the live/production environments.

This is done through carefully orchestrated deployment management techniques and tools such as Chef, Puppet, and Ansible. Having a rigid process in place becomes increasingly important as companies move towards iterative development.

Logging

Centralized logging is an indispensable part of the professional operations work process and is critical to monitoring system performance.

After all the effort involved in coordinating the development, testing, and deployment processes, it would be a pity if ‘dev’ and ‘ops’ did not coordinate to analyze the real-time product logs to gain early actionable insights into user problems, bugs, and improvements for the next iteration.

Logging is more than haphazardly trying to find the needle in a haystack of data from a variety of sources. DevOps teams taking logging seriously should take the time to develop a logging strategy, effectively structure the log data, and add context to each data point being analyzed.

This will allow for the best probability that these important insights will translate into action without delay. It also happens to be exactly where Coralogix comes into the picture.

When it comes down to it, in order for a DevOps team to truly succeed they need not only know what these aforementioned terms are, but they need to be able to implement and use them in their day to day work process. Embracing a DevOps attitude into your organization holds the promise of increased, better software deployment, so what are you waiting for?