DevOps: An Introduction
Tags: aws, devops, cloud, beginners
Published: 2022-05-23 11:33:29

Learn the basic concepts of DevOps. You will also learn the benefits of using DevOps practices in your application.

**What is DevOps?**

DevOps is essentially cultural philosophies, practices, and tools to help deliver your applications and services and tools to your huge number of users.


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**Benefits of DevOps**


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Benefits of DevOps

**Rapid Delivery** 
Increase the frequency and pace of releases so you can innovate and improve your product faster.

**Reliability** 
Ensure application updates and infrastructure changes so you can deliver at a more rapid pace.

**Scale** 
Operate and manage your infrastructure and development processes at scale.

**Speed** 
Innovate for customers faster, adapt to changing markets better, and grow more efficient

**Better Collaboration** 
Build more effective teams under a DevOps cultural model, which emphasizes values such as ownership and accountability.

**Security** 
Move quickly while retaining control and preserving compliance.

**Understanding DevOps**


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Tools used in DevOps

Tools used in DevOps DevOps stands for:

**Development and
Operations**
There are 8 phases in DevOps as follows:

1. **Plan** 
The planning phase involves a shorter goal planning. A scrum or agile planning is a better choice. The various tools you use are:

Microsoft Office, Google Docs / Sheet
Project Management Tools – Microsoft Project
Task Management tools – Asana, Jira, Mantis

2.**Code** Text editors and Integrated Development Environments

VS Code, Vim, Emacs
Eclipse, XCode, Visual Studio
Source Code Management (SCM) Tools

Git – Best Choice, Older: SVN, CVS
Server – GitLab, GitHub, or own
Unit Test Case Libraries – depends on the language

Selenium, JUnit

3. **Build** 
Build process involves compiling code, copying the assets, generating config and documentation. It should work on the developer machine as well as on the unattended machine.

There are various build tools: Maven, Ant, SBT, etc

4. **Test** 
Testing involves verifying if the code is performing as per requirement. Unit Testing starts at coding time. Write test cases before you code.
Various types of testing are: Manual testing, Unit testing, Integration testing, Stress testing

Tools: xUnit, Selenium, Scripts

To ensure completeness, we use code coverage tools like Cobertura.

5. **Release** 
Once the testing has been successfully done, the build is released as RC (release candidate) which is ready for being deployed in production.
Tools like Jenkins are used for release. Also, Apache Maven repositories are also used for releasing the binaries.

6. **Deploy** 
Once the release is finalized, we can deploy it using different automation tools: Puppet, Chef, Ansible, SaltStack
Newer tools such as Docker and Kubernetes help scale infinitely and instantaneously.

Docker and Kubernetes are used in testing also these days in Continuous Integration.

7. **Operate** 
Once the software is in production, users can use it and the product managers can customize it. During the operating phase, we can measure the effectiveness using A/B Testing.

8. **Monitor** 
We also need to monitor the various system resource consumptions such as Nagios.

We must also monitor the various logs and errors being thrown by the system. See: Apache Logging System

Visualization tools such as Grafana are used to represent metrics.

**DevOps Practices**


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DevOps Practices

**Continuos Integration** 
It refers to the build and unit testing stages of the software release process. Every code commit triggers an automatic workflow that builds the code and tests the code. It helps in finding and addressing bugs quicker.

**Continuous Delivery** 
It automates the entire software release process. Continuous Delivery extends the Continuous Integration. Every code-commit triggers an automatic workflow that builds the code (Continuous Integration). Tests the code and (Continuous Integration). Then deploys the code to staging and then to production.

**Microservices** 
Design single application as a set of small services. Each service runs its own process. Each service communicates with other services through a lightweight mechanism like REST APIs. Microservices are built around business capabilities. Each service caters to a single business purpose.

**Infrastructure as Code** 
Infrastructure is provisioned and managed using Code and Software development techniques such as Version control and Continuous integration. This helps developers and system admins to manage infrastructure at scale. Without worrying about manually setting up and configuring the servers and resources.

**Monitoring and Logging** 
Monitor metrics and logs to see how the application and infrastructure are performing. Taking necessary actions to fix the bottlenecks.

**Collaboration** 
DevOps process setup strong cultural norms and best practices. Well defined processes increase the quality of communication and collaboration among various teams