DevOps and Its Friends -- Talk about other "Ops" (Part 2)

Summary : The term DevOps is not unique when IT comes to combining software development and IT operations. For many, DevOps lays the foundation for good processes, including automation, across teams. But to improve the methodology, teams can adopt one or more of the following significant approaches -- since most of the approaches considered are tweaks to achieve a "better" DevOps culture.

The previous article gave you a brief introduction to DevOps and similar NoOps, DevSecOps, and GitOps. There are other forms of the "Ops family," but ultimately, DevOps is more popular because it provides the most comprehensive approach to improving workflows and is widely used.

DevOps vs. ITOps

Next, let's take a closer look at ITOps. Many developers see ITOps as a more traditional version of DevOps, but it's more than that. ITOps is very similar to DevOps in many ways. This approach treats software development and IT infrastructure management as a unified pipeline, and IT seeks to improve that pipeline and drive greater flexibility.

ITOps differs from DevOps in how IT manages the IT infrastructure. This is where ITOps is more traditional, as it is responsible for delivering and maintaining services, applications, and the underlying technologies necessary for operations. ITOps typically includes system administrator, network administrator, and help desk positions.

ITOps focus more on stability and long-term reliability than on agility and speed. IT infrastructure is treated as the foundation of a successful pipeline, so IT is not surprising to see this approach as more rigorous when IT comes to infrastructure management.

ITOps best practices favor using reliable, highly tested commercial software and solutions to build infrastructure -- including hardware -- because ITOps tends to focus on physical servers and networks. ITOps often has off-the-shelf commercial software or COTS in its pipeline.

The higher rigidity of this approach also means that updating infrastructure components is more complicated. ITOps places stability as a priority, so it's not always possible to quickly change the cloud and internal environment configuration. However, ITOps works well for the internal deployment of applications and services.

That doesn't mean ITOps is obsolete. Some industries rely heavily on the long-term sustainability of ITOps, such as banking and finance in general. These industries don't always need quick, sudden changes, making ITOps a more logical approach to continuous delivery.

One might think that DevOps cannot be implemented in these environments because they are not cloud-based. However, this is not the case. It is still possible to reduce WIP and warehouse size on bare metal servers.

DevOps vs. CloudOps

While ITOps moved infrastructure to the more traditional side of the equation, CloudOps did the opposite. Again, this approach is very similar to DevOps but with a shifted focus on infrastructure management. As the name suggests, CloudOps attempts to leverage more of the cloud-native capabilities modern service providers such as Amazon.

CloudOps has three main elements: distribution, statelessness, and scalability. Distributed development and deployment means there are no single points of failure. The overall cloud environment becomes more reliable and can maintain uptime. At the same time, the ability to be stateless is a vast advantage for cost efficiency, at least in some parts of the workflow.

Since it is stateless, scalability is not an issue. You only pay for the resources you actually use and how long you use them, so with a few tweaks, you can minimize the cost of cloud-related overhead. Cloud-native applications deployed using the CloudOps approach tend to have good uptime and low latency.

These advantages are further amplified by the level of automation cloud service providers now offer. However, this approach requires fully automated resource allocation, which can mean added complexity when configuring CI/CD pipes. To take full advantage of CloudOps, you must configure it correctly to take full advantage of CloudOps.

DevOps vs. CIOps

Continuous integration operations (CIOps) is the last branch on our list. CIOps requires CI operators or administrators to configure the IT infrastructure needed to support the new code before deployment. CI systems are designed to run builds and tests and then deploy at different levels of complexity depending on the complexity of the pipeline.

Since manual input is still required (to ensure that each CI job is configured correctly to deploy to the correct location), CIOps has both advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is the fine-grained control over the infrastructure itself. Unlike the predefined parameters in GitOps, the two deployments can have different infrastructure configurations.

Manually configuring the cloud environment and resource configuration makes CIOps more suitable for smaller developments; automation is a nuisance than a helpful tool in development projects. That's why CIOps are often found in smaller projects with simpler cloud infrastructures.

However, the main drawback here is that the artificial concept of the system increases the risk of human error. You also need to provide the CI tool of your choice for the API (Travis CI and CircleCI are famous), which is a considerable security risk.

CIOps also lacks comprehensive audit trails and additional flexibility compared to DevOps. This approach focuses on CI rather than CI/CD, so it does not always cover the whole process. While it gives developers some flexibility in configuring the cloud infrastructure, it takes a lot of effort to run CIOps smoothly over an extended period.

Why DevOps?

As you can see, DevOps has multiple branches and subsets, all based on unique approaches and exciting ideas. To speed up your CI/CD cycle, any methods discussed are very useful. Choosing between the two is about finding an approach that works best for the application you develop and the cloud infrastructure you use.

That said, DevOps still offers the most comprehensive approach to improving workflows because it addresses both technical processes while adopting cultural improvements. Both are equally important in a successful transition. These approaches tend to focus only on technology, and some even focus on specific platforms, ways of managing infrastructure, or specific tools.

Ultimately, this is why DevOps remains the most widely implemented of all approaches. This is proven to create an efficient and technically improved CI/CD pipeline while supporting an innovative and collaborative environment.