Getting code out used to be a really complicated process. You would write it out, essentially in your head, without any real place to test it’s functionality. Once you were done writing the code, you would then compile and run it to see if it worked. It either ran and did what you designed it to do, or it didn’t because some piece of it was broken and you’d have to find it and fix it. After that you would ship giant compiled packages, and people would uninstall and reinstall that package. This would later be replaced with FTP, but almost the entire process was manual. Time consuming. Fragile.

Much of the world’s businesses still work this way, especially enterprise companies which have been around for decades. While many of these companies are currently getting to process modernization and may be starting to incorporate DevOps, getting code out is still arduous. Sitting on a call lasting upwards of 24 hours with 70 people to get code out into prod is not conducive for any business but it’s not uncommon.

Enter DevOps. DevOps is, according to Microsoft.com, “the union of people, process and products to enable continuous delivery of value to end users.” Short for Development and Operations, DevOps creates “multidisciplinary teams that now work together with shared and efficient practices and tools.”

So what does that really look like? The idea behind DevOps is to take all of the operational steps done in order to deliver code and automate them, and put code into a pattern of continuous integration, continuous delivery. With continuous integration code written by the team is continuously merging together. You are continually looking at a picture of how it will work together, finding out if there will be conflicts, regressions or other problems, continually testing it and deploying it to test environments. Code that is continuously integrated can then be automated to continuously deploy. A small feature can be merged, go through the integration cycle and be deployed to consumers in prod in matter of minutes or hours without manual processes.

There’s no 24-hour call with 70 people. You trigger the cycle by pushing to a branch and it goes out into prod if everything passes.

The underlying theme of DevOps, DevSecOps or Process Ops is to take out all of the manual steps out of the process. You create a repeatable, automated process where the same steps are happening every time and the same tests are passing every time removing human error and delivering code patches rapidly.

DevOps takes a clunky process and makes it easier to manage with automation which will save time and money in the long run. There will be aches and pains when you first begin to implement DevOps. But just like anything new, once you get through those aches and pains, you won’t want to live without it.