What is DevOps?
DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.
How DevOps works?
DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers that work together in the entire project lifecycle, from the design and development process to product releases and support.
Starting from design and development to testing automation and from continuous integration to continuous delivery, the team works together to achieve the desired goal. People having both development and operations skill sets work together and use various tools for CI-CD and Monitoring to respond quickly to customers' needs and fix issues and bugs.
DevOps Principles?
Here are six principles that are essential when adopting DevOps:
Customer-Centric Action: The DevOps team must constantly take customer-centric action to invest in products and services.
End-To-End Responsibility: The DevOps team needs to provide performance support until they become end-of-life. This enhances the level of responsibility and the quality of the products engineered.
Continuous Improvement: DevOps culture focuses on continuous improvement to minimize waste, and it continuously speeds up the improvement of products or services offered.
Automate everything: Automation is a vital principle of the DevOps process, and this is not only for software development but also for the entire infrastructure landscape.
Work as one team: In the DevOps culture, the designer, developer, and tester are already defined, and all they need to do is work as one team with complete collaboration.
Monitor and test everything: Monitor and test everything: The DevOps team needs robust monitoring and testing procedures.
Benefit of DevOps?
DevOps allows Agile Development Teams to implement Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, which helps them launch products faster into the market.
Other Important reasons are:
Predictability: DevOps offers a significantly lower failure rate of new releases.
Reproducibility: Version everything so that earlier versions can be restored anytime.
Maintainability: Effortless recovery process in the event of a new release crashing or disabling the current system.
Time to market: DevOps reduces the time to market up to 50% through streamlined software delivery. It is particularly the case for digital and mobile applications.
Greater Quality: DevOps helps the team improve application development quality by incorporating infrastructure issues.
Reduced Risk: DevOps incorporates security aspects in the software delivery lifecycle, and it helps reduce defects across the lifecycle.
Resiliency: The Operational state of the software system is more stable, secure, and changes are auditable.
Cost Efficiency: DevOps offers cost efficiency in the software development process, which is always an aspiration of IT management.
Breaks larger code base into small pieces: DevOps is based on the agile programming method. Therefore, it allows breaking larger codebases into smaller and manageable chunks.
DevOps Model and Practices
The following are DevOps best practices:
Continuous Integration
Continuous integration is a software development practice where developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository, after which automated builds and tests are run. The key goals of continuous integration are to find and address bugs quicker, improve software quality, and reduce the time it takes to validate and release new software updates.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery is a software development practice where code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a release to production. It expands upon continuous integration by deploying all code changes to a testing environment and/or a production environment after the build stage. When continuous delivery is implemented properly, developers will always have a deployment-ready build artifact that has passed through a standardized test process.
Microservices
The microservices architecture is a design approach to build a single application as a set of small services. Each service runs in its own process and communicates with other services through a well-defined interface using a lightweight mechanism, typically an HTTP-based application programming interface (API). Microservices are built around business capabilities; each service is scoped to a single purpose. You can use different frameworks or programming languages to write microservices and deploy them independently, as a single service, or as a group of services.
Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as code is a practice in which infrastructure is provisioned and managed using code and software development techniques, such as version control and continuous integration. The cloud’s API-driven model enables developers and system administrators to interact with infrastructure programmatically, and at scale, instead of needing to manually set up and configure resources. Thus, engineers can interface with infrastructure using code-based tools and treat infrastructure in a manner similar to how they treat application code. Because they are defined by code, infrastructure and servers can quickly be deployed using standardized patterns, updated with the latest patches and versions, or duplicated in repeatable ways.
Monitoring and Logging
Organizations monitor metrics and logs to see how application and infrastructure performance impacts the experience of their product’s end user. By capturing, categorizing, and then analyzing data and logs generated by applications and infrastructure, organizations understand how changes or updates impact users, shedding insights into the root causes of problems or unexpected changes. Active monitoring becomes increasingly important as services must be available 24/7 and as application and infrastructure update frequency increases. Creating alerts or performing real-time analysis of this data also helps organizations more proactively monitor their services.
Communication and Collaboration
Increased communication and collaboration in an organization is one of the key cultural aspects of DevOps. The use of DevOps tooling and automation of the software delivery process establishes collaboration by physically bringing together the workflows and responsibilities of development and operations. Building on top of that, these teams set strong cultural norms around information sharing and facilitating communication through the use of chat applications, issue or project tracking systems, and wikis. This helps speed up communication across developers, operations, and even other teams like marketing or sales, allowing all parts of the organization to align more closely on goals and projects.
DevOps Tools
DevOps is a practice, not a tool, but tools are needed to implement it. Breaking down walls of communication and creating visibility and trust across all the teams involved in delivering software and technology fis challenging. The right tools make the automation and integrations needed across functional teams seamless, open, and scalable.
Lists of prominent DevOps automation tools are explained in detailed below:
Docker
The Docker technology stack allows DevOps teams to create, ship, and operate container-based distributed applications. This platform enables enterprises to develop applications, exchange container images, and collaborate with users by allowing them to build programs from components.
Feature highlights:
Provide a consistent and isolated environment that is cost-effective due to its rapid deployment, trial run, and rollback capabilities.
Package applications to run in a variety of environments consistently, from on-premise to AWS, Azure, Google, etc.
Image management made simple with a private registry for storing, managing and configuring image caches as well as a public registry for sharing and collaborating with your community of users.
Website: docker.com
Jenkins
Jenkins is a DevOps tool for monitoring the execution of repetitive tasks. It is one of the best tools for software deployment due to the hundreds of plugins available to assist with creating, delivering, and automating any project.
Feature highlights:
View builds and branches of code through a simple, clean GUI.
Provide an excellent history of the build and the locations of any errors that may occur. +2,000 plugins that simplify configuration and customization to meet specific requirements.
Website: jenkins.io
Puppet
It is an open-source tool specially designed for software configuration management. Puppet is a specialized and automation tool that aids to regulate different life cycles that include the configuration of components, IT infrastructure, and Operating systems across data servers.
Apache Maven
Apache Maven is a standard automation tool, which plays a vital role in the units of project management. It helps to regulate the process of build and documentation.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It schedules workloads onto compute cluster nodes and actively manages them to ensure that their state matches the users’ intentions.
Feature highlights:
Run anywhere: on-premise, hybrid, or public cloud.
Automated rollouts, rollbacks, and scaling.
Service Discovery and load balancing.
Storage orchestration.
Helm charts to deploy multiple projects with the same customized applications.
Largest community among container orchestration tools.
Git
Git is a free and open-source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
Feature highlights:
Provide various options for managing code repositories and collaboration between team members to manage codebases and branches.
Direct integration with IDEs like Eclipse, VS Code, and IntelliJ.
Website: git-scm.com
Terraform
Terraform is an open-source infrastructure-as-a-code software tool that enables the management of hundreds of cloud services via a consistent CLI workflow.
Feature highlights:
Variables can be created to make the templates generic so that they can be reused for different environments or resources.
Auto-rollback feature upon failure.
Website: terraform.io
Gradle
Gradle Build Tool is the most popular build tool for open source JVM projects on GitHub. Many popular projects have migrated from Maven to Gradle, with Spring Boot being a prominent example.
Feature highlights:
Simply-added dependencies and plugins to facilitate multi-module builds.
Widespread adoption; included in all major integrated development environments (IDEs) such as IntelliJ idea and Eclipse.
Short and clean build configurations due to the flexible DSL based on the Groovy programming language.
Website: gradle.org
Jira
Jira is a well-known platform for tracking issues and managing projects. Jira is available as a SaaS solution or as an on-premises solution.
Feature highlights:
Agile software development with Scrum and Kanban boards.
Utilize a drag-and-drop interface to create automation rules.
Integrate seamlessly with Bitbucket, GitHub, and Microsoft Teams to automate your workflow.
Website: atlassian.com
Trello
Trello is a collaborative visual tool that helps your team develop a shared perspective on any project in a fun, flexible, and rewarding way.
Feature highlights:
A variety of board systems for specified experiments and customizations.
Have multiple boards working on different projects simultaneously, each with its own set of to-dos.
Collaborate in real-time with teams through dashboards, ensuring that each project receives the attention it requires.
Website: trello.com
GitHub
GitHub supports multiple languages like Ruby, C & ECMA, etc. still, now it possesses nearly sixty million users. This tool offers SCM and offers different features & functionalities. It is available for different OS like Windows, Linux & macOS. One can easily share different packages with the aid of GitHub packages.
Website: github.com
Selenium
Selenium is an open-source Android app development tool where it automates different admin tasks. It supports multiple programming languages like Java, PHP, Python, etc. Selenium is the most ideal tool for the DevOps process.
Ansible
It is one of the prominent DevOps tools where it simplifies the development process. Ansible eradicates tasks and it is the best tool for operational teams. It executes on different operating systems like Windows, UNIX, Linux, etc. Ansible tool is the best alternative for Puppet.
Studio
Katalon Studio is a low-code and all-in-one test automation tool for web, API, mobile, and desktop (Windows). It is a popular alternative to replace self-built frameworks, reduce time spent creating, running, maintaining, and getting reports from automated tests.
Feature highlights:
Low-code and scripting test creation modes with Record & Playback, built-in keyword libraries, drag-and-drop, and Script Mode. (Java and Groovy supported)
AssertJ support to create fluent assertions in BDD style.
Data-Driven Testing (Excel, CSV, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle SQL, SQL Server) and parallel execution for wider coverage.
Various testing report formats (HTML, PDF, CSV, JUnit, etc.) and Report History to store and track results over time.
Built-in Debugging Mode, Test Artifact/Desired Capabilities Sharing, and Test Object Refactoring for stress-free maintenance.
Native CI/CD (Azure DevOps, Bamboo, Bitbucket, CircleCI, Jenkins, GitHub Action, GitLab, etc.) and ALM (Jira) integrations.
Import projects from Selenium, Selenium IDE, SoapUI, Swagger (2.0 & 3.0), Postman, WSDL, and WADL.
Splunk
This tool can easily access data and most techies prefer the Splunk tool. Splunk delivers operational intelligence data to different teams. It is one of the well-defined tools that aid firms to attain 100% productivity. Splunk platform enhances robust solutions for security purposes.
DevOps Roles And Responsibilities
Dev Ops Engineer works with developers and IT employees to oversee the code application updates. But there are other various roles that DevOps consists of. Let’s understand each role with their responsibilities.
DevOps Evangelist ➜ Responsible for ensuring that the DevOps approach is applied in the product’s end-to-end growth while making a positive environmental difference.
Automation Expert ➜ Responsible for knowing what should be automated and how a product stack can be integrated with another product stack.
Release Manager/Release Engineers ➜ Responsible for coordination and management throughout the development to product release and new features implementation.
Software Developer ➜ Responsible for code development and deployment, unit automated testing, and ongoing monitoring.
Quality Analyst ➜ Responsible for determining the software quality of product and look out for opportunities to improve any and every feature to bring customer satisfaction.
Security Engineer ➜ Responsible for monitoring the product’s security & health preventing any downtime or security risk from happening again.
Summary
The desired practice of the DevOps will encourages broader, faster, accessible, and more secure deliveries of business growth to an organization end users or the customers. By following such best practices might take the form of more frequent and parallel product releases, desired client features, or the continuous updates. It can involve how quickly a product release or new feature gets into the customers’ hands and it is possible with all the proper levels of quality and security concerns. Or, the process might focus on how quickly an issue or bug is identified, and then resolved and re-released to the production.
DevOps is the talk of the town but many companies or Individuals had a wrong interpretation that, DevOps is a job? Or DevOps is a Software Product? DevOps is a concept with different interpretations and definitions, but when you get down to it, it's all about developers and the operations teams working together to achieve a common goal.