23 Ene 2025 Unpacking DevOps

This blog post is part of our data governance blog mini-series. In the first instalment, we presented Data Governance (DG) as the driver to achieving data excellence, emphasising that a successful implementation hinges on focusing on tangible, outcome-driven initiatives. DG shouldn’t be just a theoretical exercise involving data, roles, and ownership: instead, it must cover essential technical domains like the Data Catalog, Data Quality (DQ), Master Data Management (MDM), and DevOps.

In this article, we’ll delve into the role of DevOps in enhancing the effectiveness and impact of DG. DevOps plays a pivotal role in automating and integrating processes across software development and IT operations through a set of well-defined practices and tools, and adopting a DevOps culture empowers teams to collaborate more effectively, respond to customer needs with agility, and to deliver reliable software solutions. Moreover, it helps organisations to streamline workflows, minimise bottlenecks, and to accelerate the achievement of strategic goals.

DevOps Unpacked

DevOps integrates development and operations to enhance the speed, quality, and reliability of software delivery. It is not merely a collection of tools and processes, but a cultural and organisational mindset designed to break down silos between teams. By encouraging collaboration and shared responsibility, DevOps becomes a cornerstone for creating more efficient and cohesive workflows.

DevOps focuses on automation, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), which streamline activities related to the development, testing, and deployment of data platform components across all environments. This shift towards automation empowers organisations to scale operations effectively whilst maintaining consistency, control, and adherence to standards.

The primary objective of a DevOps-driven project is to automate as much of the pipeline as possible; ideally, all phases involved in the platform lifecycle should be automated. However, the decision to automate specific phases depends on the trade-off between the effort required and the complexity of the project. The value derived from automation varies across projects, making it essential to carefully evaluate which areas offer the most return on investment.

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, organisations face numerous challenges that can hinder their ability to deliver high-quality software quickly and efficiently, highlighting the need for DevOps practices to address the following common issues:

• Inefficient Development: Developers face difficulties collaborating on the same project; this can lead to overlapping work, frequent merge conflicts, and a significant loss of time. What’s more, visibility into code changes is often limited.
• Incomplete Testing: Testing is frequently insufficient in both time and quality, resulting in a high incidence of bugs and issues in production environments, meaning frequent rollbacks and failed production deployments.
• Long Deployment Time: The processes for development, testing and deployment across environments are often poorly defined, leading to inefficiencies and delays.

Benefits of Implementing DevOps

By integrating DevOps practices, organisations can achieve significant improvements in software development and operational efficiency. Below are some key benefits that highlight the impact of implementing DevOps:

• Enhanced Delivery: Accelerates the rollout of high-quality applications and services.
• Streamlined Updates: Enables the quick, quality-driven deployment of data product updates to production.
• Seamless Transition: Ensures smooth handovers between development and operations teams.
• Agile Prioritisation: Leverages agile methods to ensure focused and timely updates.
• Quality Assurance: Guarantees product quality through rigorous testing in QA and pre-production environments.
• Automated Standards: Implements automated checks for data type standards and naming conventions.
• Team Growth: Promotes team expansion and seamless developer collaboration.
• Efficiency Gains: Cuts manual work through the automation of repetitive tasks.
• Scalable Solutions: Adapts products and services to meet evolving market demands.
• Customer-centric Delivery: Improves delivery times and ensures consistency in data projects.
• Automated Testing: Enhances solution quality with automated testing.
• Stability Improvements: Minimises rollback risks and the need for urgent production fixes.

In short, implementing DevOps means creating a streamlined pipeline that automates the development, testing and deployment of software.

CI/CD

The core of this process are CI and CD, which ensure that code changes are integrated frequently and deployed reliably. These practices form the backbone of DevOps, providing a structured approach to managing code changes and deployment cycles.

Below we can see a high-level overview of the CI/CD process, outlining the essential steps and practices that lead to a successful DevOps implementation:

• Develop: This is where developers focus on creating new features or resolving issues. A critical aspect is that all work must be committed to a remote repository, thus ensuring that the repository always contains the latest version, providing a single source of truth for the whole team.
• Collaborate: Developers should use version control to collaborate and manage changes effectively. They create a branch to work on specific features or fixes, and once the branch is completed and reviewed, it is merged back into the main codebase.
• Deploy: This is where CI/CD comes into play. These pipelines automate the integration, testing, and deployment of changes using programmatic, customisable steps. CI/CD tools streamline processes such as automated testing, workflow management, and deployment, ensuring the consistent and reliable delivery of software.

DevOps Technologies

Organisations can access various tools to implement DevOps, each offering distinct functionalities. To successfully adopt a DevOps architecture, two core technologies are essential: Automation Servers and Code Repositories.

Automation Servers

An automation server is a tool that automates repetitive tasks in the development lifecycle, such as building, testing and deploying software. These tools enable CI/CD by managing and executing processes automatically, improving efficiency and guaranteeing consistency and collaboration across teams.

Main Automation Servers:

• Azure DevOps: A comprehensive suite of modern development services for various aspects of software development, including planning, tracking, source control, continuous integration and delivery, testing, and package sharing.
• AWS CodePipeline: A fully managed, continuous delivery service used to model, visualise, and automate the steps required for software releases.
• GitHub Actions: A CI/CD platform to automate building, testing, and deploying pipelines.

Code Repositories

A code repository is a centralised storage location where developers can save, manage, and track changes to their code. The code repository plays a crucial role in facilitating version control, collaboration, and code sharing across development teams: by using repositories, multiple developers can work on the same project whilst maintaining a detailed history of all modifications, ensuring accountability and enabling seamless teamwork.

The main code repositories are:

• GitHub: A widely used web-based interface that provides a cloud-based Git repository, allowing users to create, store, modify, merge, and to collaborate on files or code.
• Azure Repos: A robust set of version control tools within Azure DevOps that can be used to manage code, track changes, and to collaborate on projects.
• AWS CodeCommit: A fully managed source control service hosted on Amazon Web Services, it allows teams to store and manage their code, track changes, and to work together on software development.

Conclusions

Adopting DevOps addresses several pain points common to traditional development processes. With benefits such as faster time-to-market, improved stability, and enhanced scalability, DevOps not only optimises the software lifecycle but also aligns technology initiatives with broader organisational goals.

As we’ve seen in this article, DevOps plays a crucial role in Data Governance by fostering collaboration, automating workflows, and improving efficiency. By implementing CI/CD practices, organisations can accelerate delivery, enhance product quality, and minimise the risk of deployment failures. Furthermore, with tools like automation servers and code repositories, DevOps helps to streamline essential tasks such as building, testing, and deployment, enabling team members to focus on higher-value activities instead of repetitive tasks.

We’ve also delved into the various technologies available for building a DevOps architecture. Selecting the right solutions depends on specific organisational needs, existing infrastructure, and compliance with regulatory requirements.

In conclusion, as data and solutions continue to grow in both volume and complexity, integrating DevOps practices will remain an indispensable strategy for achieving greater agility and operational efficiency. Here at ClearPeaks we specialise in empowering organisations to achieve their data and operational goals through tailored DevOps and Data Governance solutions with our deep expertise. Contact us today to discover how we can help you implement DevOps practices that align with your organisational objectives and deliver measurable results.