Day 01: DevOps introduction

1 . What is DevOps?

DevOps is a process or methodology and collaboration between Development(Dev) and IT Operations(Ops) to make software Production and Deployment in an automated & repeatable way.DevOps helps increase the organization’s speed to deliver software applications and services.

It allows organizations to serve their customers better and compete more strongly in the market. In simple words, DevOps can be defined as an alignment of development and IT operations with better communication and collaboration.

Some major problems before DevOps :

a) Before DevOps, the development and operation team worked in complete isolation.

b) Testing and Deployment were isolated activities done after design-build. Hence they consumed more time than actual build cycles.

c) Without using DevOps, team members spend a large amount of their time testing, deploying, and designing instead of building the project.

d) Manual code deployment leads to human errors in production.

2. Why DevOps is important in software development?

• Reduced time to market

One of the key reasons why DevOps is important for your business is that your software can be delivered faster thanks to streamlined processes, proper automation, systematic release planning, and more. Faster time to market means you have a chance to outrun your competitors.

• Faster innovation

You can innovate faster than your competitors thanks to faster product delivery to the market. The DevOps culture also allows the team to offer ground-breaking ideas more freely and share their thoughts in continuous communication.

• Increased efficiency in development

Software engineers do not need to spend time on tasks that are perfectly automated in DevOps. The amount of manual work is minimum. Parallel workflows, acceleration tools, scalable infrastructure, continuous integration servers, and much more contribute to efficient development and reliable deployment.

• Higher reliability

The development, deployment, and other processes become more predictable and error-free. With shorter development cycles ensured by DevOps and continuous testing, the team can spot any inconsistencies or defects in the software promptly. Thanks to good collaboration and exchange of experience, it’s easy to quickly resolve them. It’s also incredibly easy to roll back a deployment at any time.

• Customer satisfaction

Another huge reason why DevOps is important is that the customer-centric approach, regular feedback, faster delivery to the market, and constant improvement all contribute to the most satisfying results in software development.

3. What are Automation, Scaling and Infrastructure?

Automation

DevOps automation is the practice of automating repetitive and manual DevOps tasks to be carried out without any human interaction. Automation can be applied throughout the DevOps lifecycle, spanning:

• Design and development

• Software deployment and release

• Monitoring

  The goal of DevOps automation is to streamline the DevOps lifecycle by reducing manual workload. This automation results in several key improvements:

• Eliminates the need for large teams

• Drastically reduces human errors

• Increases team productivity

• Creates a fast-moving DevOps lifecycle

  Scalability

  Automated processes are much easier to scale than manual processes. Scale automation processes simply by creating additional processes to meet the increased requirements.

  In a manual environment, any scaling is severely constrained by the availability of team members.

  However, in an automated environment, scaling is only constrained by the availability of underlying software and hardware, which is not an issue in cloud-based environments where resources are automatically scaled depending on the workload. A great example of this is the Automatic Scale In/Out and Up/Down functions.

  Infrastructure

  DevOps helps in the automation of infrastructure. This enables the operations team and the developers to manage, facilitate, and monitor the resources automatically. This saves the hassle and effort of having to do everything manually, which can slow down the process and cause an organization to function inefficiently. Since the infrastructure is automated, the DevOps teams can test the applications very early during the development cycle. This allows the provision for multiple environments for testing and helps to keep at bay the common issues related to deployment.

  There is something called Infrastructure as Code(IaC) is the technique that can help in the management, provisioning, and configuration of an IT environment with the help of code in manual setup, which will incorporate the use of operating systems and hardware devices. The feature of automation enables the DevOps teams to quickly develop the cloud setting that will be required to test the application and run it as a trial. Some known IaC tools are Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.

  Some DevOps tools are :