The word “efficiency” has many synonyms. When it comes to web development, you can put an equals sign between “efficiency” and “DevOps,” as well as between “efficiency” and “Agile.” But do Agile and DevOps have an equals sign between them? They both help web development companies carry out their mission: deliver web products faster, more reliably, and with higher customer satisfaction. This similarity in the philosophy of Agile and DevOps makes many people think they are interchangeable, as well as wonder what the difference between Agile and Devops is. Let’s take a look at it now.
The difference between Agile and DevOps
Though similar in many approaches, Agile and DevOps are different concepts. They do not replace each other and neither do they compete — rather, Agile and DevOps perfectly complement each other.
Roughly, the difference between Agile and DevOps is that Agile is a set of values and principles to be guided by in software development, while DevOps is a set of practices to streamline the processes of software deployment, configuration, and more. The difference between Agile and DevOps will be clearer when we discover the essence of both.
The essence of Agile
In the early days of web development, there existed only the so-called Waterfall approach. The dev team agreed to the requirements with the client, set to work, and then delivered the project. However, in the end, the result could be entirely different from what the client had expected. In addition, developers might discover new details on the project that required a shift in attitude.
What they all needed was to become more… agile! That’s how the new methodology appeared. Among the most important Agile practices are breaking the project into smaller sprints, discussing the result of every stage with the customer and each other and being ready to implement changes, among others. However, Agile values are much broader, and they are set out in the Agile Manifesto.
The Agile methodology brought famous notions and tools such as Scrum meetings and Scrum master, the Kanban board, retrospective, and many more.
Among Agile benefits are unmatched transparency and flexibility, continuous improvement, more focused work, streamlined processes, effective collaboration, quick response to the needs of time and, of course, to the wishes of customers.
The essence of DevOps
Sometimes, names speak for themselves, and there is nothing else to add. The term “DevOps” is one of these. To understand the main nature of DevOps, it is enough to know that this term is a merger of “development” and “operations.”
The two words have merged perfectly, and so have the processes that stand behind them! DevOps is a set of practices to create a seamless cooperation between software developers and operation engineers. It strives to streamline, automate, secure, speed up, and quickly solve any possible problems in the software delivery.
DevOps is associated with continuous integration, uptime monitoring, deployment or setup of a website, a server, or an infrastructure. The key tools in DevOps are Docker, Git, Jenkins, Puppets, Ansible, and others.
The word “DevOps” first emerged at a conference related to web performance and operations in 2009, during the speech “10 Deploys a Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr” by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond. Belgian engineer Patrick Debois then organized the first purely-DevOps conference, DevOpsDays, and introduced the #DevOps hashtag. This gave life to the new term, though DevOps as a set of practices had actually existed before then.
Wrap-up
That’s basically the essence, as well as differences, between Agile and DevOps. We can see that it would be wrong to say “Agile = DevOps”, and equally wrong to consider them opposites. A nice formula would be something like “Agile + DevOps = great web product.”
However, there is still one component missing in this formula — a reliable team that knows how to make the best of Agile and Devops. Get one here!
