What is DevOps?
DevOps is a framework and culture which bridges the gap between Software Development and IT Operations teams. The word DevOps can be broken down into “Development” and “Operations”. Usually in most organisations Software development (“Dev’s”) is in one team and IT operations (“Op’s”) or Incident response is in another team. However, in the culture of DevOps these teams are brought closer together or employees are hired specifically as “DevOps Engineers” who focus on testing and fixing live products.
Devops Explained . Source: Dotnettricks.com
Benefits of DevOps?
If your organisation wants to build better and more reliable software faster, while solving bugs in a seamless way then the “DevOps” culture and framework could be for you. The framework also improves product quality, reduces failures and reduces costs due to preplanned and automated responses.
Benefits of DevOps Source: Onjection Labs
How to Use DevOps?
As DevOps is a framework, culture and set of practices, implementing it can be done in many ways. Below you can see the DevOps development cycle which with follows the Plan, Build, Deploy, Operate Process. However, the process also provides Continuous Feedback to the Development team. In addition to continuous integration with the Operations teams. In order to accomplish this various software tools can be integrated together from Planning in Microsoft Project or Jira to building and deploying with GitHub and Docker or Kubernetes containers.
How to Use DevOps? Source: DevOpsleverage.com
Website Testing and Monitoring
Before a website launch to customers it’s easy to test the website functions, API’s and use a Sandbox for payment systems. However, once the website or application is in a production environment these checks become more vital and difficult. The need to spot errors before your customers is vital and thus setting up automated website testing systems can be useful.
There are many automated testing tools you can use such as Selenium which is often called the “Swiss Army Knife” of testing which supports cross browser automation (Chrome, Safari etc), API automation testing and Database automation. Best of all the Selenium platform is free and open source. Ghost Inspector is another great platform which includes an easy to use interface and even the ability to record your screen and generate scripts for testing (no coding required!). You can also setup scheduled tests (for example every 30 minutes) and alerts to be sent if any errors. The platform is used by teams at Intercom and is paid but offers a free trial I believe. Testim is another popular tool for automated software testing and is used by teams at Microsoft. Runscope is another platform which is for API testing and is used by teams at Microsoft and Twilio (which has a strong DevOps culture). IBM Rational Functional Tester (RFT) is another tool for full software testing and is a paid option. There is also Pingdom by Solar Winds, which is useful for “Synthetic Monitoring” where you can Simulate visitor interaction, in addition to “Real User Monitoring” where you can gain visibility into actually how users are using your website. Other free open source tools include the Puppeteer Chrome Developer tool, which is for Chrome Browser only (obviously). In addition to Microsoft Playwright which can be used for cross browser testing and tends to be faster than Selenium.
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