What is DevOps: Relationship Between DevOps & Continuous Delivery

Today, every enterprise wants faster and continuous releases. Therefore, businesses are shifting from the waterfall approach to the DevOps approach. In DevOps methodology, continuous delivery plays an important role, but sometimes people use the terms DevOps and continuous delivery interchangeably. However, there is a clear distinction between these two terms, and at the same time, these two terms share common goals and background. Let us now try to understand these two terms in more detail and let’s see how these terms are related to each other.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is an evolution from agile methodology and is a software development approach that aims to break traditional silos that existed between cross-functional teams. The main aim of this methodology is to bring developers, IT operations, testers, and QA teams together. It is more like culture rather than a philosophy that fosters collaboration and communication between cross-functional teams.  The main of this methodology is to automate the process of software delivery by enabling CI/CD pipelines. DevOps lifecycle has the following phases – continuous development, continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous feedback, continuous monitoring, and continuous deployment/delivery.

What is continuous delivery?

Continuous delivery is an essential phase of the DevOps lifecycle. In this phase, teams ensure that after doing iterations in the software, the software can be delivered at any point of time. With this approach, teams ensure that every change in the system can be released or any version of the software can be released without any delay. With the help of continuous delivery, teams can deliver the product frequently, with less risk, and can achieve feedbacks from end-users constantly and continuously. This approach promotes the use of an automated deployment pipeline or CI/CD pipeline by which businesses can release reliable software quickly. The main aim of the continuous delivery phase is to speed up the time-to-market and to eliminate risks in the traditional software delivery process.

What is the relationship between DevOps and Continuous Delivery?
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The primary relation between DevOps and continuous delivery is that DevOps supports continuous delivery of the value chain. This is achieved by automating the CI/CD pipeline. Both of these approaches share common traits i.e. they follow aimed at agile and lean principles. Each of them works on iterations where small and quick changes are delivered; cross-functional teams collaborate and both of them work towards a common goal i.e. faster time to market.
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Automation plays a major role in DevOps and continuous delivery. By automating the DevOps process businesses can manage continuous delivery of software to end-users. The end-result of automating the DevOps process and CI/CD pipeline is faster delivery of high-quality software. 

Conclusion:
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To achieve faster and continuous delivery of high-quality software to end-users, businesses are rapidly adopting the DevOps methodology. Not only this methodology helps them to achieve faster time-to-market but also helps them to achieve improved collaboration between cross-functional teams such as developers, operations, testers, and QA teams. Leverage DevOps consulting from a next-gen QA and software testing services provider to achieve strategic DevOps implementation and faster time-to-market.

About the author: I am a technical content writer and I write articles on various IT-related topics. In this article, I have tried to share my views on what is DevOps and the relationship between DevOps and continuous delivery.