Devops 102
DevOps culture
It’s generally accepted that DevOps methods can’t work without a commitment to DevOps culture, which can be summarized as a different organizational and technical approach to software development.
At the organizational level, DevOps requires continuous communication, collaboration and shared responsibility among all software delivery stakeholders – software development and IT operations teams for certain, but also security, compliance, governance, risk and line-of-business teams – to innovate quickly and continually, and to build quality into software from the start.
In most cases the best way to accomplish this is to break down these silos and reorganize them into cross-functional, autonomous DevOps teams that can work on code projects from start to finish – planning to feedback – without making handoffs to, or waiting for approvals from, other teams. When put in the context of agile development, the shared accountability and collaboration are the bedrock of having a shared product focus that has a valuable outcome.
At the technical level, DevOps requires a commitment to automation that keeps projects moving within and between workflows, and to feedback and measurement that enable teams to continually accelerate cycles and improve software quality and performance.
DevOps tools: building a DevOps toolchain
The demands of DevOps and DevOps culture put a premium on tooling that supports asynchronous collaboration, seamlessly integrates DevOps workflows, and automates the entire DevOps lifecycle as much as possible. Categories of DevOps tools include:
Project management tools – tools that enable teams to build a backlog of user stories (requirements) that form coding projects, break them down into smaller tasks and track the tasks through to completion. Many support agile project management practices such, as Scrum, Lean and Kanban, that developers bring to DevOps. Popular open source options include GitHub Issues and Jira.
Collaborative source code repositories – version-controlled coding environments that that let multiple developers to work on the same code base. Code repositories should integrate with CI/CD, testing and security tools, so that when code is committed to the repository it can automatically move to the next step. Open source code repositories include GiHub and GitLab.
CI/CD pipelines – tools that automate code checkout, building, testing and deployment. Jenkins is the most popular open source tool in this category; many previously open-source alternatives, such as CircleCI, are now available in commercial versions only. When it comes to continuous deployment (CD) tools, Spinnaker straddles between application and infrastructure as code layers. ArgoCD is another popular open source choice for Kubernetes native CI/CD.
Test automation frameworks – these include software tools, libraries and best practices for automating unit, contract, functional, performance, usability, penetration and security tests. The best of these tools support multiple languages; some use artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically reconfigure tests in response to code changes. The expanse of test tools and frameworks is far and wide! Popular open source test automation frameworks include Selenium, Appium, Katalon, Robot Framework, and Serenity (formerly known as Thucydides).
Configuration management (infrastructure as code) tools – these enable DevOps engineers to configure and provision fully versioned and fully documented infrastructure by executing a script. Open source options include Ansible (Red Hat), Chef, Puppet and Terraform. Kubernetes performs the same function for containerized applications (see ‘DevOps and cloud-native development,’ below).
Monitoring tools – these help DevOps teams identify and resolve system issues; they also gather and analyze data in real time to reveal how code changes impact application performance. Open source monitoring tools include Datadog, Nagios, Prometheus and Splunk.
Continuous feedback tools – tools that gather feedback from users, either through heatmapping (recording users’ actions on screen), surveys, or self-service issue ticketing.
DevOps and cloud-native development
Cloud-native is an approach to building applications that leverage foundational cloud computing technologies. The goal of cloud-native is to enable a consistent and optimal application development, deployment, management and performance across public, private and multicloud environments.
Today, cloud-native applications are typically
Built using microservices – loosely-coupled, independently deployable components that have their own self-contained stack, and communicate with each other via REST APIs, event streaming or message brokers.
Deployed in containers – executable units of code that contain all the code, runtimes and operating system dependencies required to run the application. (For most organizations, ‘containers’ is synonymous with Docker containers, but other container types exist.)
Operated (at scale) using Kubernetes, an open-source container orchestration platform for scheduling and automating the deployment, management and scaling of containerized applications.
In many ways, cloud-native development and DevOps are made for each other.
For example, developing and updating microservices – that is, the iterative delivery of small units of code to a small code base – is a perfect fit for DevOps rapid release and management cycles. And it would be difficult to deal with the complexity of a microservices architecture without DevOps deployment and operation. A recent IBM survey of developers and IT executives found that 78% of current microservices users expect to increase the time, money and effort they’ve invested in the architecture, and 56% of non-users are likely to adopt microservices within the next two years.
By packaging and permanently fixing all OS dependencies, containers enable rapid CI/CD and deployment cycles, because all integration, testing and deployment occurs in the same environment. And Kubernetes orchestration performs the same continuous configuration tasks for containerized applications as Ansible, Puppet and Chef perform for non-containerized applications.
Most leading cloud computing providers – including AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Cloud – offer some sort of managed DevOps pipeline solution.
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