Application development involves various cycles or phases, right from writing code to testing and deployment. Usually, to carry out the development process of any application, two teams — Development and Operations — are involved for better product delivery.
While the Development Teams write codes, design new features, and test applications, Operation Teams manage customer feedback, customer issues, and more processes related to customer services.
Whenever Operation Teams receive any feedback/issue from the customer, they revert back to the development team to fix that issue. But, if the Development Team is busy building the next update or application, resolving the issue gets postponed.
This extends the Development Timeline as well as reduces the quality of the application. To fix this problem, DevOps was introduced to effectively manage the entire Applications Development Lifecycle. In the DevOps process, the Development and the Operation teams do not work in separate arenas as the Traditional Software Development process. They collaborate with each other to build applications faster and also fix customer issues quickly.
In this article, you will learn about Atlassian DevOps, DevOps pipelines, different tools used in the DevOps process, and how Atlassian DevOps uses its own services.
Prerequisites
- An idea of the Software Development process
What is DevOps?
DevOps is the combination of two words: Development and Operations. DevOps is a set of practices that focuses on bringing both Development and Operation teams together in order to improve collaboration and productivity during product development. It also helps organizations in optimizing infrastructure, workflow, and continuously measuring the application performance.
In other words, DevOps is an engineering culture of collaboration, learning, and accelerating Software Development right from ideation to production. With DevOps, organizations eliminate bottlenecks, reduce interpersonal friction, and accelerate team productivity.
For instance, DevOps teams automate everything in the application lifecycle, from building and testing codes to how infrastructure or user interface should be provisioned. They do this collaboratively by writing software in small chunks that are integrated, tested, monitored, and deployed at a more reliable and faster rate.
The traditional way of Application Deployment involves the process of writing large pieces of software for weeks or months and then take several weeks or months for testing. To avoid this, DevOps Culture was introduced to make both teams work simultaneously instead of waiting for the other to finish their job.
This methodology increases the frequency of software/application deployment as well as productivity. Many prominent companies like Amazon, Netflix, Facebook have successfully implemented DevOps Culture to enhance their application’s user experience.
Key Benefits of DevOps
Here are the major benefits of DevOps,
1) DevOps Pipelines
DevOps Pipeline follows the practice of CI/CD that is abbreviated as Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. This practice ensures that a Software Application Life Cycle follows predefined steps for writing, building, analyzing, and deploying applications.
In other words, the DevOps Pipeline is a well-structured setup in building an end-to-end software project. It offers Continuous Integration and Deployment that further leads to continuous delivery of a software application whenever a new update is made.
DevOps Pipeline is constructed with a set of automated processes and tools that allows developers and operations professionals to collaborate on building and deploying code to a production environment.
From the above image, you can notice that the DevOps process is implemented in various phases with the help of multiple tools to build a wholesome application. These stages are plan, code, build, test, release, deploy, operate, and monitor. At the initial stage of the Development Pipeline, a developer writes a code and places the code in the source code repository.
In the next step, the application is built using the code in the repository. Then various Unit Testings are done on the newly created application. If any issues or bugs are found, the application is reported back to the developer to fix those issues.
After that, Security and Penetration testing is done in the UAT (User Acceptance Testing) or Interactive Testing Environment. Once the application passes all the test cases and is ready for production, it is released to the production environment, where the application is deployed for the end customer.
Finally, in the operation and monitor phase, the Operation Team continuously observes the deployed application. If any issues or bugs are faced by the customers, they will immediately ask the Development Team to resolve the respective issues.
2) DevOps Tools
Since the DevOps Pipeline involves various stages to deliver/deploy software applications, each stage will require you to use specific tools to perform the respective process.
In the following section, you will see the list of tools used in each phase of the DevOps Pipeline.
Plan: Most famous Project Management Tools like Jira, Slack, Confluence are used to plan the roadmaps of the project and track the progress of the team members.
Code: Once the plan is ready, the next step is to write code for the application. For that, popular Source Code Management tools like Bitbucket, GitLab, Bugzilla are used.
Build: The Build phase is where the application is compiled and developed. Tools like Maven, Gradle can be used for building applications.
Test: Once the application is delivered to the testing environment, a series of manual and automated testing is performed to ensure the application is bug-free. For testing, you can use popular tools like Selenium, JUnit, Cucumber.
Deploy: After the Testing process, an application is ready to be released into production. This is the phase where the application is deployed into the Production Servers. For deploying purposes, you can use tools like Terraform, Puppet, IBM Active Deploy.
Operate: The newly released application is now live and is being used by customers. At this stage, the Operation Teams use tools like IBM Tealeaf, Ansible to ensure whether the application is running smoothly without bugs or errors.
Monitor: This is the crucial stage of DevOps Cycles where the team continuously monitors the application’s performance by using popular tools like Sensu, Nagios, Splunk. The system errors like server not reachable, server down are resolved in this phase.
Integrate: This stage is the heart of the whole DevOps Lifecycle because it integrates the Development and Operations teams to fix the issues. In this stage, developers frequently commit changes to the Source-code based on the feedback received by the Operation teams. Jenkins and Bamboo are the most popularly used tools for this phase.
What is Atlassian DevOps?
Image Source
Atlassian, an Australian-based company, offers various tools to implement end-to-end DevOps for building Software Applications. For Atlassian DevOps, you can use Atlassian tools like Jira, Confluence, Jira service management, Bamboo, and more. To further extend and enhance the functionality of Atlassian DevOps, it provides 4200 third-party add-ons or plugins.
According to the company, 80% of the Fortune 500 companies use Atlassian products, such as the Atlassian DevOps, to perform Software and Business-related tasks of an organization. Since Atlassian DevOps knows and meets the enterprise’s needs, over 182,000 companies worldwide use Atlassian to power Agile and DevOps transformation.
How to use Atlassian Services for DevOps?
In the Atlassian DevOps environment, project teams can use Jira software and Confluence for planning the roadmaps, stages, and different features of the project. Using these two, Atlassian DevOps can also track the progress of applications under development. In the build stage, Bitbucket and Jira software can be used to compile and run the code.
Next, the Continuous Integration phase takes place, where the Bamboo tool is used for Atlassian DevOps to automatically build and test source code to prepare the application for deployment. Now, the Atlassian DevOps app is ready for deployment, and once again the Bamboo tool is used for delivering the application to the customers.
In the next stage, the Atlassian DevOps application is deployed and used by the customers. If any issues or errors occur on the customer side, tools like the Jira Service Desk and Confluence are used to trace and track them so that the teams can solve the issues quickly.
After that, the integration phase provides continuous feedback to the software teams using the Bamboo and Jira Service Desk tools. Besides, Development Teams and Operation Teams can use the HipChat application to resolve their queries or doubts at every step of the project. This chatting application can be used on mobile, desktops, and even on wearable gadgets.
Some of the tools used for Atlassian DevOps are listed below:
- Jira Software: This application is used for planning and tracking projects, bugs, issues, and team progress. This Atlassian DevOps tool also involves the roadmaps created to implement different features at different stages of an application.
- Bitbucket: Bitbucket offers developers more flexibility to manage, store and branch the application codes for Atlassian DevOps.
- Bamboo: It is a Continuous Integration and Deployment tool used to transfer the developed application into Production. This tool for Atlassian DevOps is also used to ensure that new change/update is reflected in the production environment.
- Jira Service Desk: This Atlassian DevOps tool is mainly used in the operation and monitor phase of the DevOps Pipeline. The operations teams use it to track the issues or bugs faced by the customers/users once the application is deployed into production.
- Hipchat: This is an On-premise Instant Messaging application that enables different teams to share updates, ideas, codes, and files.
Conclusion
Today many companies lean towards automation with the goal of reducing the delivery time of each and every new update made on the existing applications. This enables companies to frequently offer new features and better experiences to their customers. To attain all these aspects, companies use Atlassian DevOps.
In this article, you have learned about Atlassian DevOps, DevOps Pipelines, and Atlassian DevOps Services. However, there are many prominent DevOps Tools available in the market that also provide better automation and flexibility with the application development process.
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Ishwarya is a skilled technical writer with over 5 years of experience. She has extensive experience working with B2B SaaS companies in the data industry, she channels her passion for data science into producing informative content that helps individuals understand the complexities of data integration and analysis.
