What DevOps is Not!
It is not a tool, it is not a software, and it is not a programming language.
Confused? – Let us clarify-DevOps is a philosophy and mindset – how you take your app/website/project and make that product useable for millions of people efficiently.
DevOps is a concept used in application lifecycle management, and it makes sure that the development and operation teams work in sync.
What is DevOps?
Of late, DevOps has become a buzzword.
It’s a challenging task to understand what exactly DevOps is as it more of a mindset and collaboration between Dev & Ops teams.
The word ‘DevOps’ is a combination of two words, ‘Development’ and ‘Operations.’
DevOps is a collaboration between Development and IT Operations to make software production and deployment in an automated and repeatable way.
DevOps helps to increase the organization’s speed in delivering software applications and services. It allows organizations to serve their customers better and compete more strongly in the market. After all, time to market is the key to success.
In this DevOps tutorial for beginners, let us try to understand what the buzz is all about.
Why is DevOps needed?
Before we dive deeper into the concepts, let us understand why we need DevOps in the first place.
Back in the days, the operations and development teams would often work in silos. There was a significant number of code errors in the process as Software development was a highly manual process.
Distributed applications often require deploying the binary and configuration files to multiple servers. It becomes challenging to figure out what, how, and where to deploy when you have a big application.
This means, development and operations teams can often be out of sync, which can slow software delivery and lead to unhappy business stakeholders.
DevOps creates efficiency across all tasks involved in the development, deployment, and maintenance of software. The entire DevOps process enables developers to verify what works, then taking it to the next level with automation to implement continuous development.
Check this out:
All the basics you need to know – Get started with DevOps.
How is DevOps related to Agile Development Practices? DevOps Vs Agile
Although Agile and DevOps are both software development practices, each has a slightly different focus, and they often go hand in hand.
DevOps culture focuses on creating efficiency for all stakeholders involved in the development, deployment, and maintenance of software.
Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches.
Instead of betting everything on a “big bang” launch, an agile team delivers work in small but consumable increments. Agile is often specific to the development team, where the scope of DevOps extends to all stakeholders involved in the production and maintenance of software.
DevOps and agile can work independently of one another, but it is highly recommended that development shops should implement best practices from both arenas.
Who is a DevOps Engineer?
A DevOps Engineer is an IT professional who operates with software developers, system operators, & production staff.
Both hard and soft skills to communicate & collaborate with teams are expected by the DevOps engineer.
The DevOps approach needs frequent, incremental changes to code versions, which means frequent deployment and testing regimens. Although DevOps engineers need to code hardly from scratch, it is essential they should have the basics of software development languages.
Key Concepts of DevOps
Continuous integration, deployment, and delivery are three phases of an automated software release pipeline, including a DevOps pipeline.
What is Continuous Integration?
Continuous integration (CI) is the practice of automating the integration of code changes from multiple contributors into a single software project. When it comes to releasing the code, continuous development helps to save a lot of time.
It is worth noting that Continuous integration is an agile engineering practice that comes from the Extreme Programming methodology. DevOps adopted this practice because when it comes to executing continuous integration successfully, automation is required.
A source code version control system is the heart of the CI process. The version control system is also supplemented with other checks like automated code quality tests, syntax style review tools, and more.
What is Continuous Delivery in DevOps?
It is an extension of continuous integration and also the second stage of DevOps.
Continuous delivery is the fundamental practice that occurs within DevOps, enabling fast, reliable software delivery.
The delivery phase is responsible for packaging an artifact together to be delivered to end-users. This stage runs automated building tools to generate this artifact.
In short, Continuous integration is a process that is a component of continuous delivery. It’s a practice to keep your codebase in an almost ready-to-deployable state.
What is Continuous Deployment?
Continuous deployment is the final phase of the pipeline. This practice allows the software to be deployed to production without any human intervention.
Automation testing is the key to continuous deployment. All the newly created code runs through the automation testing suite before getting into the production stage.
Based on your deployment strategy, the code might be deployed to a small number of users for an automated feedback loop that monitors the quality and usage before the code gets to the next level.
Continuous DevOps lifecycle:
1. Development
The development of software takes place regularly. In this stage, the complete development process is separated into short development cycles. This benefits the DevOps team to speed up the software development and delivery process.
2. Testing
QA team use tools like Selenium to recognize and fix bugs in the new part of code.
3. Integration
In the Integration stage, new functionality is blended with the current code, and testing takes place. Constant development is only possible due to continuous integration and testing.
4. Deployment
The deployment process takes place continuously. It is conducted in such a practice that any changes made at any time in the code should not influence the functioning of high traffic website.
5. Monitoring
In this phase, the operation team will take charge of the inapt system behavior or bugs discovered in production.
What is DevSecOps?
In some DevOps models, quality assurance and security teams may become more tightly integrated with development and operations throughout the application lifecycle.
When security is the focus of everyone on a DevOps team, this is sometimes referred to as DevSecOps.
DevSecOps teams use practices and tools to automate processes that historically have been manual and slow. These tools also help engineers independently accomplish tasks (for example, deploying code or provisioning infrastructure) that usually would have required help from other teams. This further increases a team’s velocity.
What are the common DevOps Tools?
Answer this –
Below are some of the common DevOps Tools used by software companies all around the globe to improve the velocity of their agile development cycle:
Docker – Docker is a set of platform as a service product that uses OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are isolated from one another and bundle their own software, libraries, and configuration files; they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels.
Kubernetes – Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem.
Ansible – Ansible is an open-source IT Configuration Management, Deployment & Orchestration tool. It aims to provide large productivity gains to a wide variety of automation challenges.
Git – Git is software for tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows.
Puppet – Puppet is a software configuration management tool that includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration. It is a model-driven solution that requires limited programming knowledge to use.
Chef – A chef is an open-source configuration management tool that uses Ruby to develop essential building blocks like recipes and cookbooks. It is an automation tool that converts infrastructure to code.
Jenkins – Jenkins is a free and open-source automation server. It helps automate the parts of software development related to building, testing, and deploying, facilitating continuous integration and continuous delivery. It is a server-based system that runs in servlet containers such as Apache Tomcat.
Splunk – Splunk is a software that processes and brings out insight from machine data and other forms of big data. This machine data is generated by the CPU running a webserver, IoT devices, logs from mobile apps, etc.
Conclusion
DevOps is a practice that encourages collaboration between Development and Operations Team to speed up the development process. Automation makes production much efficient as Manual code deployment leads to human errors—DevOps benefits companies in shifting their code deployment cycles to weeks and months instead of years and offers Maintainability, Predictability, Greater quality cost efficiency, and time to market.
DevOps is a buzzword these days. If you are working in a cloud environment, then you really cannot get away with DevOps.
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