DevOps

What is DevOps ?

The aim is to break down barriers which traditionally existed between the development (Dev) and the operational (Ops) teams, organizations can reduce the time and friction involved in deploying new versions of software.

DevOps also aims to employ automation to every process involved in software development, and we know that automation brings in increased productivity to any company and cost optimization. This effort will ideally lead to shorter development cycles which ideally may save time and money, and give the organization a competitive edge against others with longer, more traditional development cycles.

What are the benefits in DevOps ?

Faster deployment of products compared to the pre-DevOps scenario. This is facilitated by improved communication among teams. Achieves a faster time to market. Faster the testing of a product, faster it reaches the consumers, hence beating other competitors in the market and reaping higher profits.

Reduces the recovery time. DevOps assists us through automated rollbacks and decreases the recovery time of the software, and this, in turn, increases the reputation of the organization, resulting in higher profits again. Lowers the failure rate of new releases. Having been put through multiple checks before the final deployment into the market, we can be confident of onsistent results on the quality of products. Some of the major DevOps benefits are as follows:
Breaking Silos DevOps breaks down the conventional style of departmentation where each task is designated to a certain team and, in effect, it used to be siloed. This, in turn, reduced flexibility and responsiveness. Going beyond the lines of organizational hierarchy, DevOps promoted mutual cooperation and communication
Continuous Improvement DevOps stresses continuous improvement by aligning business with IT. It strives to reduce the feedback cycle and delivery loops which, in turn, increases customer satisfaction
Minimized Failures When organizations integrate DevOps with fault detection techniques, it leads to minimizing failures significantly. Since DevOps is usually implemented on top of the Agile model, it promotes collaboration, modular programming, etc., making fault detection an easy task
Creativity and Innovation In DevOps, teams build a culture of trust and cooperation that encourages them to improve the organizational products and services by continuously working on creativity and innovation. These attempts allow organizations to better understand and address their customer needs
Performance-oriented Culture With DevOps, organizations become more performance-based than power-based. This makes the workforce more creative and productive while reducing turnover and improving retention

DevOps Lifecycle

DevOps focuses on bringing all the development, operations, and IT infrastructure guys, including Developers, Testers, System Admins, and QAs, all under one umbrella. The engineering practise share the end-to-end responsibility of gathering information, setting up the infrastructure, developing, testing, deploying, continuous monitoring, and fetching feedback from end-users. This process of developing, testing, deploying, and monitoring keeps on repeating for better results.

The different stages in the DevOps life cycle that contributes to the consistent software development life cycle (SDLC):

Continuous Development

In the Waterfall model, our software product gets broken into multiple pieces or sub-parts for making the development cycles shorter, but in this stage of DevOps, the software is getting developed continuously.

Tools used: As we code and build in this stage, we can use GIT to maintain different versions of the code. To build/package the code into an executable file, we can use a reliable tool, namely, Maven.

Continuous Integration

In this stage, if our code is supporting a new functionality, it is integrated with the existing code continuously. As the continuous development keeps on, the existing code needs to be integrated with the latest one ‘continuously,’ and the changed code should ensure that there are no errors in the current environment for it to work smoothly.

Tools used: Jenkins is the tool that is used for continuous integration. Here, we can pull the latest code from the GIT repository, of which we can produce the build and deploy it on the test or the production server.

Continuous Testing

In this stage, our developed software is getting tested continuously to detect bugs using several automation tools.

Tools used: For the QA/Testing purpose, we can use many automated tools, and the tool used widely for automation testing is Selenium as it lets QAs test the codes in parallel to ensure that there is no error, incompetencies, or flaws in the software.

Continuous Monitoring

It is a very crucial part of the DevOps life cycle where it provides important information that helps us ensure service uptime and optimal performance. The operations team gets results from reliable monitoring tools to detect and fix the bugs/flaws in the application.

Tools used: Several tools such as Nagios, Splunk, ELK Stack, and Sensu are used for monitoring the application. They help us monitor our application and servers closely to check their health and whether they are operating actively. Any major issue detected by these tools is forwarded to the development team to fix in the continuous development phase.

What is a DevOps Toolchain?

DevOps revolve around the concepts of continuous integration, continuous delivery, automation, and collaboration. As already mentioned DevOps is more of a practice than technology, there is no single tool that can manage to all stages of software development. Rather, DevOps forms a series of tools.

A DevOps toolchain is a set or combination of tools that aid in the delivery, development, and management of software applications throughout the systems development life cycle, as coordinated by an organisation that uses DevOps practices.

Toolchains can be created, orchestrated and stored in the cloud using some key aspects of a DevOps approach:

  • Automation
  • Integration
  • Self-service
  • Collaboration

How to Build a DevOps Toolchain?

One aim of the DevOps toolchain is around standardization of the DevOps framework. In that way, a toolchain integrates seamlessly with other DevOps tools and processes and helps developers follow the same consistent flow every time.

Standardization and consistency is an important function of the DevOps toolchain, in a framework that is sometimes otherwise abstract and left for subjective interpretation. A toolchain quite literally shapes the processes of how you apply DevOps, so using the right one is important.

There are two ways to build a toolchain

An in-the-box toolchain is a solution that has been created by someone else and provides standard offerings that you can select from to tailor to your unique needs. Using a pre-orchestrated set of tools allows for greater standardization and integration with less manpower to do it.

The other option is to opt to customize a toolset yourself. When you do this, you select the discrete tools you need for your toolchain and carefully orchestrate them to work together in your DevOps pipeline.

Uses for a DevOps Toolchain

You may have figured out that the DevOps toolchain is capable of a lot of things, but it does have some typical uses. Below, we are going to explore what they are:

Faster Time to Innovation

By standardizing a pipeline where software is always being deployed, a DevOps toolchain helps enterprise businesses innovate better and faster. These tools assure agile and rapid delivery of software products with monitoring, automated testing, and diagnosis capabilities. Businesses who innovate more quickly can ensure they keep an edge on the competition.

Fine-Tuning Incident Control

Incident management can be a problem for even the most agile fast-moving teams. Using a DevOps toolchain helps developers work from a place of incident control. Utilizing a mix of automation and good, old-fashioned collaborative efforts teams respond faster and more effectively to incidents with tools designed to simplify this process.

Quality Assurance

One of the more emphasized uses for a DevOps toolchain is to resolve software defects quickly and accurately to assure quality releases. With automated notifications, everyone can get on the same page faster to major problems with software. This helps two-fold: offering a boost to resolution speed and end-user satisfaction.

Stages of DevOps

Generally, DevOps tools fit into one or more activities, which supports specific DevOps initiatives: Plan, Create, Verify, Package, Release, Configure, Monitor, and Version Control

Plan

Plan is composed of two things: define and plan. This activity refers to the business value and application requirements.

The “Plan” activities include:

  • Business case and objectives
  • Requirements
  • Release plan and timing
  • Security policy and requirement

Stakeholders, clients, and employees working with different teams should have common goals. Therefore, transparency among all participants is important. Planning tools provide this transparency.

The DevOps culture focus on collaboration and communication between different teams. Different teams like development, testing, and product coordinate and work to automate this entire process. Collaboration tools help teams work together regardless of time zones and locations. Faster communication means faster software releases.

Create

Create is composed of the building, coding, and configuring of the software development process.

The specific activities are:

  • Design of the software and configuration
  • Coding including code quality and performance
  • Software build and build performance
  • Release candidate

Tools and vendors in this category often overlap with other categories. Because DevOps is about breaking down silos, this is reflective in the activities and product solutions.

Verify

Verify is directly associated with ensuring the quality of the software release; activities designed to ensure code quality is maintained and the highest quality is deployed to production.

The main activities in this are:

  • Acceptance testing
  • Regression testing
  • Security and vulnerability analysis
  • Performance
  • Configuration testing

Solutions for verify related activities generally fall under four main categories: Test automation, Static analysis , Test Lab, and Security.

An increase in transparency results in clearer vision, making it easier and faster to track issues. There are issue tracking tools, but there is a condition: all the teams should be using the same tracking tool.

Package

Packaging refers to the activities involved once the release is ready for deployment, often also referred to as staging or Pre-production

This often includes tasks and activities such as:

  • Approval/pre-approvals
  • Package configuration
  • Triggered releases
  • Release staging and holding

A product might be getting developed on a daily basis or an hourly basis. The code needs to be flowing smoothly from the developer’s machine to the production environment, thus a repository manager is a good way to bridge this gap. Repositories contain collections of binary software artifacts, metadata, and code.

A few examples of binary repositories are: Artifactory, Nexus, Maven

Release

Release related activities include schedule, orchestration, provisioning and deploying software into production and targeted environment.

The release activities may include:

  • Release coordination
  • Deploying and promoting applications
  • Fallbacks and recovery
  • Scheduled/timed releases

Solutions that cover this aspect of the toolchain include application release automation, deployment automation and release management.

Configure

Wouldn’t it be perfect if all your system was automatically configured and updated without you having to worry about it? Configuration management tools are meant for that. These tools help manage your infrastructure as code, which then avoids configuration drifts across environments.

Widely used configuration management tools are as: Ansible, Puppet, Chef

Monitor

As the name suggests, monitoring is a must in DevOps for smooth execution. Monitoring tools ensure service uptime and optimal performance.

A couple of examples of monitoring tools are as follows: Sensu, Prometheus, Grafana, AWS Cloudwatch, DataDog, Kibana, Graphite, Splunk

Version Control

You need a centralized storage location for all your data, documentation, code, configurations, files, etc. Data from this source control can then further be divided into different branches for teams to work on. Source control tools give you these features to exploit.

An example of source control tooling is Git

Roles and responsibilities of a DevOps engineer

DevOps is more of a culture that is being incorporated by the giants in the IT world currently. DevOps, when practiced the right way keeping certain roles and responsibilities in mind, helps overcome the gap between development and operations teams.
Project planning and management In addition to monitoring software and regulating and updating tools, DevOps Engineers need to have expertise in keeping track of the costs, benefits, risks, and much more of various projects.
Design, development, and deployment DevOps Engineers are required to design, develop, and deploy automated modules for smooth functioning within the production environment, by utilizing risk-management techniques, tests, etc.
Communication and support DevOps Engineers should have exceptional communication skills that come in handy when they need to work and coordinate with different departments and provide support.
Technical skills Some basic technical experience and familiarity with configuration tools are a must.
Interpersonal skills Since DevOps Engineers are in constant interaction with other departments in the organization, they should be approachable, organized, and foresighted team players with an ability to multitask.
Troubleshooting Last but not least, one of the major responsibilities of DevOps Engineers is to troubleshoot and come up with apt solutions for various errors to benefit the firm with speed and efficiency.