The term DevOps has been derived from the combination of two words, ‘Development‘ and ‘Operation.’ In the world of solos’, the concept of DevOps is a disruptive technology that brings the culture of collaboration. Of Course, the inception of DevOps came out of frustration due to the division between the developer team and operation team.
The DevOps movement always gives preference over the collaboration between the people than processes and tools. In DevOps philosophy, outcomes start appearing from ‘Day One.’ People are working on the changes rather than stressing over a plan.
In the past developing trends, the team used to works separately for a while, and the last task is accomplished by merging the changes. This made merging the changes made on the code ‘a headache’ and also resulted in bugs being accumulated for an extended period without being corrected. The final result was slowing the updates and extension of delivery time.
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How does a simple DevOps scenario works?
Before initiating a project, developer, tester and operation team meet and discuss on how to create working software that could be readily deployed. After finalizing on the context and working module, the developer team each day deliver with a new code. The working module is then pushed to a central repository using version control system tools like Git. Before performing each commit, the developer might want to run the local unit tests on the code as an extra verification procedure before to integration.
Continuous Integration (CI) tools automatically build and
Advantages of DevOps:
- Through the concept of microservices and continuous delivery, it is easier and faster to prepare a release update. Thus, it helps the business grow more efficiently.
- The automation tools used in release process helps to deliver innovation and improve the product more frequently rapidly.
- The system and application become more reliable and stable due to the practice of continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) before being presented to end-users.
- The scalability is higher due to the concept of microservices and API design.
DevOps Practices:
Here are the top development operation practices you need to follow according to your programming skills.
Continuous Integration:
Continuous integration (CI) is a DevOps practice where the programmer merges their build codes to the central repository. The version of the system is committed to the repositories like Git where after the codes are automatically built and test, and further can be pushed to the production servers. The merging is done regularly, and each version of the build is updated based upon the test result.
Continuous Delivery:
You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.
Steve Jobs
CD completely redefines how a product is delivered to end users. Each time developers present an application module, it can be automatically built, tested and deployed to the end user through a simple ‘push‘ button. Any feature addition and change just get simpler.
MicroServices:
A monolithic application design always slows down the application development as well as for making changes to the existing design. Because all the services are tightly coupled and always create a dilemma on what be the impact on the portion of the application when change is made on other portion.
The basic principle of microservice architecture is to divide a single application into multiple services. Each of the services has its own scope and any communication necessary required between the services is made through API ‘calls’.
Blue/Green deployment:
The basic concept of blue/green deployment is to have two identical production environment where blue is ‘live‘ and green is ‘idle‘. This greatly reduces the application downtime. As a new application is deployed, it is initially deployed to the ‘green’ server. After the successful testing on the green server, then all the required IP is pointed to the ‘green’ server and it goes ‘live’. If any problem occurs, the switch can be turned back to the ‘idle’ one to direct all the traffic to it.
However, this approach might not be feasible if cost is the factor as well as database-dependent application.
Chaos Monkey:
This practice has been invented and popularized by Netflix.”What will happen when a monkey enters a Data Center? A monkey may randomly rip off the cables and may kick the routers and servers. “This is the situation a DC operation team must be able to face to make a system resilient. Netflix has developed a program that randomly to shut down a server and IT managers need to mitigate this situation by keeping the system operational even without that server.
A developer always thinks of making a system more agile while an operation team want the system to be more stable. So, a delicate balance is required to maintain a good relationship between a developer team and operation team otherwise it might blow up. DevOps culture with the help of numerous automation tools can greatly add value to the development to deployment phase and satisfy the end users on time.
Last but not least, the DevOps is not a magic stick and transformation doesn’t happen overnight. By properly understanding the values of DevOps and making small incremental changes, we can embark on DevOps journey right away.