What is DevOps ?

• DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.

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.

• What is Automation, Scaling, Infrastructure

  For more than a decade now, DevOps has been bringing the development and IT teams together to release better software, faster. Despite its relative maturity, this practice still confronts roadblocks that hinder its progress.

  Irregular resource allocation, misalignment of responsibilities, fragmented processes, lack of metrics to achieve the goal are some of the factors that limit organizations to adopt and scale DevOps practices. While the blockers to DevOps adoption are many, the one that bothers the IT team the most is infrastructure management.

  A managed infrastructure ensures that the resources are secured, load-balanced, configured, regularly backed up and monitored for compliance, and can scale up or down according to the requirement. However, manually performing these tasks for multiple enterprise-level solutions is not feasible. That is why infrastructure automation is a sought-after practice in DevOps.

• Understanding Infrastructure Automation and its Benefits

  Infrastructure automation (or configuration management/scripted infrastructure) enables developers or the operations team to automatically manage, monitor, and facilitate resources instead of manually configuring hardware, software, or operating systems. The process is sometimes referred to as programmable because the infrastructure configuration is defined in scripts.

  The idea of automating infrastructure enables the DevOps teams to test applications in a production-like environment, early in the development cycle. It gives them the confidence to provision multiple test environments and prevents common deployment issues on time.

  The several benefits of infrastructure automation include improving speed and efficiency of development, flexibility to align with modern IT practices, etc. Let’s talk about them in detail.

  • Automation improves speed and efficiency

Automated management and provisioning of resources ascertain that the software development cycle is more efficient compared to manual processes. Virtualization, resource management, networking, databases, and user account management are all covered in an automated environment. Moreover, a scripted infrastructure allows to scale up or shut down resources/environment as the requirement strikes.

• Automation maintains consistency in the environment

When software developers program the infrastructure, they follow business practices and policies to make the system foolproof, instead of relying upon system admins in the DevOps environment. The config file helps to maintain consistency in the environment, ensuring that any component dysfunction does not affect the entire setup.

• Infrastructure Automation DevOps: Challenges Involved

  Along with the benefits, infrastructure automation has some challenges as well. Apart from writing scripts and making infrastructure programmable, the developers require additional tools for configuration management and automation/orchestration system. This can lead to learning curves and chances for error. These errors can escalate through servers, especially in automation scenarios. That is why it is important to monitor version control and perform comprehensive testing before the final release.

  Moreover, if there are any changes to the infrastructure outside of the defined server configuration, it results in configuration drift. Therefore, when infrastructure code is integrated into IT operations, system administration, and DevOps practices, it must be done following standard procedures and policies.

  Another important aspect of infrastructure automation is security and regular monitoring. This would require investment in additional tools, training, and need testing to integrate them into workflows.

• Creating an Infrastructure: Mutable vs Immutable Infra

  Mutable and Immutable - These are the types of infrastructure that can be created using automation. In a mutable infrastructure, the infra components are changed in production while the services continue to function normally. On the other hand, in immutable infrastructure, the components and resources are assembled to create a new service or application. Any changes to the component would result in an update or redeployment of the instance. The new iteration of the service/application is tested and launched while the old one is discontinued.

• Infrastructure Automation: How to get started?

  There are two approaches to program an infrastructure: declarative programming and imperative programming.

  In the declarative approach, the desired state of infrastructure is defined, generally using SQL statements. For example, AWS CloudFormation templates are written in a declarative style.

  In an imperative approach, commands to automate the infrastructure are written using Object Oriented languages such as Java, C++. For example, third-party automation tools like Chef helps to program infrastructure automation using an imperative approach.

  When choosing a tool or approach for infrastructure automation, it is important to consider the target deployment. For example, AWS CloudFormation is the right choice for managing AWS infrastructure. Similarly, for on-premise servers, tools like Chef can be an ideal choice.

• Why DevOps is Important?

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  Now that we have defined DevOps, we must go beyond and analyze the reasons for companies to adopt this methodology.

  Before we discuss such motives, it might be interesting to point out that, according to DevOps.com, the number of companies that have incorporated DevOps has been increasing exponentially every year.

  The reasons that have contributed the most to DevOps’ development are:

  1. Shorter development cycles that encourage innovation

  The fact that both departments (development and operations) come together is an advantage when it comes to releasing new apps, products… It is generally known that the more innovative companies are, the higher their chances of outrunning the competition. Which is essential to increase significantly competitiveness.

  2. More collaboration, better communication

  Thanks to the union between both teams, productivity improves a lot. The DevOps culture is based on achieving the best performance in such a union, instead of worrying about individual objectives.

  As a result of both departments being fused, the process becomes more fluid since everyone is oriented towards a common goal.

  To ensure that your DevOps team reaches its best performance, it is necessary to create a transparency culture in which responsibilities are shared and immediate feedback is guaranteed.

  -Microservices: everything you need to know-

  3. Reduced deployment failures and faster time to recover

  Most failures during development occur due to programming defects. Having a DevOps team will allow for more releases in shorter time spawns. This way, it is easier and more likely to find possible defects in the code. For this same reason, and in case any problem must be solved, recovery will be quicker thanks to the knowledge and participation of all members during the development process.

  4. Efficiency: Improved resource management

  Increased efficiency helps speed up development and reduce coding defects and problems.

  Nowadays, some programs are capable of automating DevOps tasks, reducing, as a result, the need for manual labor. What does this mean? Simply put, that software engineers can concentrate more on the kind of tasks that cannot be automated.