What is the importance of DevOps, what does it mean for IT professionals, description of methods, frameworks and tools.
A lot has happened since the term DevOps has taken hold in the IT world. With much of the ecosystem open source, it's important to reconsider why this started and what it means for a career in IT.
What is DevOps
While there is no single definition, I believe that DevOps is a technology framework that enables collaboration between development teams and operations teams to deploy code more quickly to production environments with the ability to replicate and automate. We will spend the rest of the article unpacking this statement.
The word "DevOps" is a combination of the words "development" (development) and "operations" (operations). DevOps helps speed up the delivery of applications and services. This allows organizations to effectively serve their customers and become more competitive in the marketplace. Simply put, DevOps is about alignment between development and IT operations, with better communication and collaboration.
DevOps envisions a culture where collaboration between development teams, operators, and business teams is considered critical. It's not just about tools, because DevOps in an organization is constantly delivering value to customers as well. Tools are one of its pillars, along with people and processes. DevOps increases the ability of organizations to deliver high-quality solutions in the shortest possible time. DevOps also automates all processes, from build to deployment, application or product.
The DevOps discussion focuses on the relationship between developers, the people who write software for a living, and the operators responsible for maintaining that software.
Challenges for the development team
Developers tend to be enthusiastic and willing to implement new approaches and technologies to solve organizational problems. However, they also face certain problems:
- The competitive market creates a lot of pressure to deliver the product on time.
- They must take care of managing production-ready code and implementing new features.
- The release cycle can be long, so the development team has to make several assumptions before deploying applications. In this scenario, more time is needed to resolve issues that arise during deployment to a production or test environment.
Challenges faced by the operating group
Operations groups have historically focused on the stability and reliability of IT services. That is why operations teams are looking for stability through changes in resources, technologies or approaches. Their tasks include:
- Manage resource allocation as demand grows.
- Handling changes in design or customizations that are required to apply to a production environment.
- Diagnose and resolve production-related issues after self-deploying applications.
How DevOps solves development and operations problems
Instead of rolling out a large number of application features at once, companies are trying to see if they can roll out a small number of features to their customers through a series of release iterations. This approach has a number of advantages such as better software quality, faster customer feedback, etc. This, in turn, ensures a high degree of customer satisfaction. To achieve these goals, companies are required to:
- Reduce the failure rate for new releases
- Increase deployment frequency
- Achieve faster mean time to recovery in the event of a new application release.
- Reduce time for corrections
DevOps takes care of all these tasks and helps ensure a seamless delivery. Organizations are using DevOps to achieve levels of performance that were unthinkable just a few years ago. They perform dozens, hundreds and even thousands of deployments a day while delivering world-class reliability, stability and security. and their impact on software delivery).
DevOps attempts to address various issues that result from past methodologies, including:
- Isolation of the work of development teams and operators
- Testing and deployment as separate phases after design and build that take longer than build cycles.
- Excessive time spent testing, deploying and designing instead of focusing on building core business services
- Manual code deployment leading to errors in production
- Differences in the schedules of development and operations teams leading to additional delays
Confrontation of DevOps, Agile and traditional IT
DevOps is often discussed in relation to other IT practices, in particular agile and waterfall IT infrastructure.
Agile is a set of principles, values, and methods for producing software. So, for example, if you have an idea that you want to turn into software, you can use Agile principles and values. But this software can only run in a development or testing environment. You want a simple, secure way to quickly and repeatably move software to production, and the path is through DevOps tools and practices. Agile software development focuses on development processes, with DevOps responsible for developing and deploying in the safest, most reliable way possible.
Comparing the traditional waterfall model to DevOps is a good way to understand the benefits DevOps brings. The following example assumes that the application will be launched in four weeks, development is 85% complete, the application will be live, and the process of purchasing servers for code submission has just begun.
Traditional processes
Processes in DevOps
After placing an order for new servers, the development team works on testing. The focus group is working on the extensive documentation that enterprises need to deploy the infrastructure.
After placing an order for new servers, the development and operations teams work together on the processes and workflow for installing new servers. This allows you to better understand the infrastructure requirements.
Distorted information about failover, redundancy, data center location, and storage requirements is missing input from a development team that has deep knowledge of the application.
Detailed information about failover, redundancy, disaster recovery, data center locations and storage requirements is known and correct due to the contribution of the development team.
The task force has no idea of ββthe development team's progress. She also develops a monitoring plan based on her own ideas.
The task force is fully aware of the progress made by the development team. She also interacts with the development team and they jointly develop a monitoring plan that satisfies IT and business needs. They also use application performance monitoring (APM) tools.
A load test performed before an application is launched causes the application to crash, delaying its launch.
A load test performed before the application is launched results in performance degradation. The development team quickly eliminates bottlenecks and the application launches on time.
DevOps Life Cycle
DevOps involves the adoption of certain generally accepted practices.
Continuous planning
Continuous planning draws on the principles of lean to start small by identifying the resources and results needed to test business value or vision, continually adapt, measure progress, understand customer needs, change direction as needed to accommodate agility, and update business plan.
Joint development
The collaborative development process allows businesses, development teams, and test teams across multiple time zones to continuously deliver quality software. This includes multi-platform development, multilingual programming support, user story creation, ideation, and lifecycle management. Collaborative development includes the process and practice of continuous integration, which encourages frequent code integration and automated builds. By frequently injecting code into an application, integration issues are caught early in the life cycle (when they are easier to fix), and the overall integration effort is reduced by continuous feedback as the project shows continuous and demonstrable progress.
Continuous testing
Continuous testing reduces the cost of testing by helping development teams balance speed and quality. It also eliminates test bottlenecks with service virtualization and makes it easy to create virtualized test environments that can be easily shared, deployed, and upgraded as systems change. These capabilities reduce the cost of provisioning and maintaining test environments, as well as shortening the test cycle time, allowing integration testing to be performed early in the lifecycle.
Continuous release and deployment
These methodologies bring with them one of the core practices: continuous release and deployment. This provides a continuous pipeline that automates key processes. It reduces manual steps, resource wait times, and rework by enabling push-button deployment for more releases, fewer bugs, and full transparency.
Automation plays a key role in ensuring a stable and reliable software release. One of the biggest challenges is to take manual processes like build, regression, deployment, and infrastructure and automate them. This requires source code version control; test and deployment scenarios; application infrastructure and configuration data; as well as the libraries and packages that the application depends on. Another important factor is the ability to query the status of all environments.
Continuous monitoring
Continuous monitoring provides enterprise-grade reporting that helps development teams understand the availability and performance of applications in a production environment before they are deployed to production. The early feedback provided by continuous monitoring is critical to reducing the cost of errors and keeping projects moving in the right direction. This practice often includes monitoring tools, which tend to reveal metrics related to application performance.
Constant feedback and optimization
Continuous feedback and optimization provide a visual representation of customer flow and pinpoint problem areas. Feedback can be included in both the pre-sales and post-production stages to maximize value and ensure even more transactions are completed successfully. All of this provides immediate visibility into the root cause of customer issues that affect their behavior and impact on the business.
Benefits of DevOps
DevOps can help create an environment where developers and operators work as a team to achieve common goals. An important milestone in this process is the introduction of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). These techniques will enable teams to bring software to market faster with fewer errors.
The important benefits of DevOps are:
- Predictability: DevOps offers a significantly lower failure rate for new releases.
- Maintainability: DevOps provides easy recovery in case of failures in a new release or application shutdown.
- Reproducibility: A version control system for an assembly or code allows you to restore earlier versions as needed.
- Higher quality: Solving infrastructure problems improves the quality of application development.
- Time to market: Software delivery optimization reduces time to market by 50%.
- Risk reduction: Ensuring safety in the software lifecycle reduces the number of defects throughout the lifecycle.
- Cost Efficiency: The pursuit of cost efficiency in software development appeals to senior management.
- Stability: The software system is more stable, secure, and changes can be tested.
- Larger codebase is broken down into manageable parts: DevOps is based on agile development practices that allow you to break down a large codebase into smaller, manageable parts.
DevOps principles
The adoption of DevOps has spawned several principles that have evolved (and continue to evolve). Most solution providers have developed their own modifications to the various methodologies. All of these principles are based on a holistic approach to DevOps, and organizations of all sizes can use them.
Develop and test in a production-like environment
The point is to allow development and quality assurance (QA) teams to develop and test systems that behave like production systems so they can see how the application behaves and performs well before it is ready for deployment. .
The application should be connected to production systems as early as possible in the lifecycle to address three main potential problems. First, it allows you to test the application in an environment close to the real environment. Second, it allows you to test and validate application delivery processes in advance. Third, it allows the operations team to test early in the lifecycle how their environment will behave when applications are deployed, thereby allowing them to create a highly customizable, application-centric environment.
Deployment with reproducible, reliable processes
This principle allows development and operations teams to maintain agile software development processes throughout the entire life cycle. Automation is critical to creating iterative, reliable and reproducible processes. Therefore, the organization must create a delivery pipeline that enables continuous, automated deployment and testing. Frequent deployment also allows teams to test deployment processes, thereby reducing the risk of deployment failures during actual releases.
Monitoring and checking the quality of work
Organizations are good at monitoring production applications because they have tools that capture metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) in real time. This principle moves monitoring early in the life cycle, ensuring that automated testing tracks the functional and non-functional attributes of an application early in the process. Whenever an application is tested and deployed, the quality metrics must be examined and analyzed. Monitoring tools provide early warning of performance and quality issues that may arise during production. These indicators should be collected in a format that is accessible and understandable to all stakeholders.
Improving Feedback Loops
One of the goals of DevOps processes is to enable organizations to respond and make changes faster. When delivering software, this goal requires the organization to receive feedback early on and then quickly learn from each action taken. This principle requires organizations to create communication channels that allow stakeholders to access and interact on a feedback basis. Development can be done by adjusting their project plans or priorities. Manufacturing can act by improving the working environment.
Dev
- Planning: Kanboard, Wekan, and other Trello alternatives GitLab, Tuleap, Redmine and other JIRA alternatives Mattermost, Roit.im, IRC and other alternatives to Slack.
- Code writing: Git, Gerrit, Bugzilla; Jenkins and other open source CI/CD tools
- Assembly: Apache Maven, Gradle, Apache Ant, Packer
- Tests: JUnit, Cucumber, Selenium, Apache JMeter
Ops
- Release, deployment, operations: Kubernetes, Nomad, Jenkins, Zuul, Spinnaker, Ansible, Apache ZooKeeper, etcd, Netflix Archaius, Terraform
- Monitoring: Grafana, Prometheus, Nagios, InfluxDB, Fluentd, and more covered in this guide
(* The tools for operations have been numbered in order of being used by the operations commands, but their tooling is overlapped by the lifecycle stages of the release and deployment tools. The numbering has been removed for readability.)
In conclusion
DevOps is an increasingly popular methodology that aims to bring developers and operators together. It is unique, different from traditional IT operations, and complementary to Agile (but not as flexible).
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Source: habr.com