DevOps
DevOps
DevOps is a software development method that focuses on communication, integration, and collaboration among IT professionals to enables rapid deployment of products.
DevOps is a culture that promotes collaboration between Development and Operations Team. This allows deploying code to production faster and in an automated way. It helps to increases an organization’s speed to deliver application and services. It can be defined as an alignment of development and IT operation.
HOW DOES DEVOPS WORK
Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams are no longer “siloed.” Sometimes, these two teams are merged into a single team where the engineers work across the entire application lifecycle, from development and test to deployment to operations, and develop a range of skills not limited to a single function.
In some DevOps models, quality assurance and security teams may also become more tightly integrated with development and operations and throughout the application lifecycle. When security is the focus of everyone on a DevOps team, this is sometimes referred to as DevSecOps.
These teams use practices to automate processes that historically have been manual and slow. They use a technology stack and tooling which help them operate and evolve applications quickly and reliably. These tools also help engineers independently accomplish tasks (for example, deploying code or provisioning infrastructure) that normally would have required help from other teams, and this further increases a team’s velocity.
Benefits of DevOps
Speed
Move at high velocity so you can innovate for customers faster, adapt to changing markets better, and grow more efficient at driving business results. The DevOps model enables your developers and operations teams to achieve these results. For example, microservices and continuous delivery let teams take ownership of services and then release updates to them quicker.
Rapid Delivery
Increase the frequency and pace of releases so you can innovate and improve your product faster. The quicker you can release new features and fix bugs, the faster you can respond to your customers’ needs and build competitive advantage. Continuous integration and continuous delivery are practices that automate the software release process, from build to deploy.
Reliability
Ensure the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes so you can reliably deliver at a more rapid pace while maintaining a positive experience for end users. Use practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery to test that each change is functional and safe. Monitoring and logging practices help you stay informed of performance in real-time.
Scale
Operate and manage your infrastructure and development processes at scale. Automation and consistency help you manage complex or changing systems efficiently and with reduced risk. For example, infrastructure as code helps you manage your development, testing, and production environments in a repeatable and more efficient manner.
Improved Collaboration
Build more effective teams under a DevOps cultural model, which emphasizes values such as ownership and accountability. Developers and operations teams collaborate closely, share many responsibilities, and combine their workflows. This reduces inefficiencies and saves time (e.g. reduced handover periods between developers and operations, writing code that takes into account the environment in which it is run).
Security
Move quickly while retaining control and preserving compliance. You can adopt a DevOps model without sacrificing security by using automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques. For example, using infrastructure as code and policy as code, you can define and then track compliance at scale.
Phases of DevOps
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.
Configuration Management
Developers and system administrators use code to automate operating system and host configuration, operational tasks, and more. The use of code makes configuration changes repeatable and standardized. It frees developers and systems administrators from manually configuring operating systems, system applications, or server software.
Policy as Code
With infrastructure and its configuration codified with the cloud, organizations can monitor and enforce compliance dynamically and at scale. Infrastructure that is described by code can thus be tracked, validated, and reconfigured in an automated way. This makes it easier for organizations to govern changes over resources and ensure that security measures are properly enforced in a distributed manner (e.g. information security or compliance with PCI-DSS or HIPAA). This allows teams within an organization to move at higher velocity since non-compliant resources can be automatically flagged for further investigation or even automatically brought back into compliance.
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.
Application Performance Monitoring Tools
Prometheus: open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. Since its inception in 2012, many companies and organizations have adopted Prometheus.
2. Dynatrace provides software intelligence to simplify cloud complexity and accelerate digital transformation.
Test automation tools
Selenium: Selenium is an open-source automated testing framework for web applications. Selenium provides a playback tool for authoring functional tests without the need to learn a test scripting language (Selenium IDE).
- It also provides a test domain-specific language (Selenese) to write tests in a number of popular programming languages, including C#, Groovy, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Scala.
- The tests can then run against most modern web browsers. Selenium runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Deployment and server monitoring tool
Splunk :-A software platform widely used for monitoring, searching, analyzing and visualizing the machine-generated data in real time. It performs capturing, indexing, and correlating the real time data in a searchable container and produces graphs, alerts, dashboards and visualizations.
Configuration Management tools
Puppet Puppet is an open source software configuration management and deployment tool.
- Automate and simplify critical manual tasks.
- Saving time and money, scaling effectively and do this effectively.
Ansible: Ansible delivers simple IT automation that ends repetitive tasks and frees up teams for more strategic work.
•Configuration management
•Orchestration.
Container management
Docker Docker is open-source technology and a container file format — for automating the deployment of applications as portable, self-sufficient containers that can run in the cloud or on-premises.
·Standardized Packaging .
·Linux and Windows Server OSs.
·Build, test and collaborate.
·Verified publishers.
·Package, Execute and Manage distributed applications with Docker App.
Conclusion
Companies that incorporate DevOps practices get more done, plain and simple. With a single team composed of cross-functional members all working in collaboration, DevOps organizations can deliver with maximum speed, functionality, and innovation.Over 90% of organizations have claimed that devops has had a direct impact on their business metrics. With tools such as the ones mentioned before, companies are seeing 100s of times increase in speed for completion innovation of projects etc.
Authors:
Aditya Dere
Anushka Ahire
Mandar Ambulkar
Daksh Dagariya
Vedant Jore
References
1.M. Virmani, “Understanding DevOps & bridging the gap from continuous integration to continuous delivery,” Fifth International Conference on the Innovative Computing Technology (INTECH 2015), 2015, pp. 78–82, doi: 10.1109/INTECH.2015.7173368.
2.https://www.engpaper.com/devops.htm
3.M. Hills, “Introducing DevOps Techniques in a Software Construction Class,” 2020 IEEE 32nd Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T), 2020, pp. 1–5, doi: 10.1109/CSEET49119.2020.9206183.
