What is DevOps?
DevOps is a process in which, Modern software engineering Culture and Practices develop software where the development and operation teams work hand in hand as one unit, unlike the traditional ways, it is called the Agile Methodology. The traditional methods before it were time-consuming and lacked understanding between different departments of Software Development, which led to more time for updates and to fix bugs, therefore ultimately leading to customer dissatisfaction. The developer must change the software from the beginning to make a small change. That's why DevOps Processes provide such a culture allows fast, efficient, reliable software delivery through production
What are the Business benefits?
Listed below are the benefits of DevOps -
- Maximize the speed of delivery of the product.
- Enhanced customer experience.
- Increased time to value.
- Enables fast flow of planned work into production.
- Use Automated tools at each level.
- More stable operating environments.
- Improved communication and collaboration.
- More time to innovate.
What are the 6 C's of DevOps Processes?
Its practices lead to high productivity, minor bugs, improved communication, enhanced quality, faster resolution of problems, more reliability, better and timely delivery of software.- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Testing
- Continuous Delivery
- Continuous Deployment
- Continuous Monitoring
- Continuous Business Planning
Continuous Integration
It means isolated changes are tested and reported when they are added to a larger codebase. Continuous integration aims to give rapid feedback so any defect can be identified and corrected immediately. Jenkins is used for continuous integration, which follows 3 step rule, i.e., build, test, and deploy. Here developer makes frequent changes to the source code in the shared repository several times a day. Along with Jenkins, we have more tools, too, i.e., BuildBot, Travis, etc. Jenkins widely used because it provides plugins for testing, reporting, notification, deployment etc.
Continuous Testing
Continuous Testing obtains immediate feedback on the business risk associated with Software Releases. It's a challenging and essential part of the software. Software rating depends upon Testing. The test function helps the developer to balance quality and speed. Automated tools are used for testing as it is easier to test continuously than testing a full software. The tool used for testing the software is Selenium.Continuous Delivery
It is the ability to do changes like including new features, configuration management, fixes bugs and experiments into production. Our motive for doing continuous delivery is a continuous daily improvement. If there is an error in the production code, we can quickly fix it at that time. So, here we are developing and deploying our application rapidly, reliably and repeatedly with minimum overhead.
Continuous Deployment
The code is automatically deployed to the production environment as it passes through all the test cases. Continuous versioning ensures that multiple code versions are available in the proper places. Here every changed code is put into production, automatically resulting in many deployments in the production environment every day.Continuous Monitoring
It is a reporting tool because of which developers and testers understand the performance and availability of their application, even before it is deployed to operations? Feedback provided by continuous monitoring is essential for lowering the cost of errors and change. Nagios tool is used for continuous monitoring.Continuous Business Planning
Continuous Business Planning begins with determining the resources required by the application. The goal of continuous business planning is to define the results and capabilities of the application. Key Technologies and Terminologies in its Processes.
Key Technologies and Terminologies in its Processes
What are Microservices?
Microservices is an architectural style of developing a complex application by dividing it into smaller modules/microservices. These Microservices are loosely coupled, deployed independently, and are appropriately focused by small teams. With Microservices, developers can decide how to use, design, language to choose, a platform to run, deploy, scale, etc.
Advantages of Microservices Architecture
- Microservices can be developed in various programming languages.
- Errors in any module or microservices can easily be found, thus saving time.
- Smaller modules or microservices are easier to manage.
- Whenever any update is required, it can be immediately pushed on that particular microservices; otherwise, the whole application needs to be updated.
- We can scale up and down a particular microservice according to client needs without affecting the other microservices.
- It also leads to an increase in productivity.
- If anyone module goes down, the application remains largely unaffected.
Disadvantages Of Microservices Architecture
- If an application involves several microservices, managing them becomes a bit difficult.
- Microservices lead to more memory consumption.
- In some cases, Testing Microservices becomes difficult.
- In production, it also leads to the complexity of deploying and managing a system comprising different services.
Overview of Containers and Docker
What are Containers?
Containers create a virtualization environment that allows us to run multiple applications or operating systems without interrupting each other. With the container, we can quickly, reliably, and consistently deploy our application because containers have their CPU, memory, network resources, and block I/O that are shared with the host operating system's kernel. Containers are lightweight because they don't need the extra load of a hypervisor; they can be directly run on a host machine. Before, we faced a problem that code could efficiently run on the developer environment, but a dependency issue occurred while executing it in the production environment. Then virtual machines came, but they were heavyweight, which led to wastage of RAM; the processor is also not utilized thoroughly. VM is not the best option if we need more than 50 microservices to run.
What are the advantages of using Containers?
- Wastage of resources like RAM, Processor, and Disc space is controlled as there is no need to pre-locate these resources, and they are met according to application requirements.
- Sharing a container is easy.
- Docker provides a platform to manage the lifecycle of containers.
- Containers provide a consistent computation environment.
- Containers can run separate applications within a single shared operating system.
Container Orchestration
It is Automated, Arrangement, Coordination, and Management of containers and the resources they consume while deploying a multi-container packed application.
Container Orchestration Features
There are various features of Orchestration. Some of them are given below:
- Cluster Management - The developer's task is limited to launching several container instances and specifying the functions needed to run. Orchestration does administration of all containers.
- Task Definitions - It allows the developer to define a task where they have to specify the number of containers required for the work and their dependencies. Many tasks can be launched through a single job definition.
- Programmatic Control - With simple API calls, one can register and de-register tasks and launch and stop Docker containers.
- Scheduling - Container scheduling deals with placing the containers from the cluster according to the resources needed and the requirements' availability.
- Load Balancing - Helps in distributing traffic across the containers/deployment.
- Monitoring - One can monitor CPU and memory utilization of running tasks and alert if containers need scaling.
Containers can give DevOps OS-level virtualization by which OS distributions and the infrastructure are not the concerns of DevOps anymore. Click to explore the Guide to Understand the Role of Containers in DevOps
What is Docker?
Docker is a light weighted Container with inbuilt images and comparatively occupies much less space. But for running a Docker, we need Linux or Ubuntu as a host machine.
What is Docker Hub?
It's a cloud-hosted service provided by Docker. Here we can upload our image or also can pull the images in a public repository.
- Docker Registry- Storage component for Docker images Either we can store in a public repository or private repository. We are using this to integrate image storage with our in-house development workflow and control where images are stored.
- Running Docker Images- The read-only template that is used to create the container. Built by Docker user and stored on Docker hub or local registry.
- Docker Containers- It's a runtime instance of a Docker image. It's built from 1 or more images.
Hence, Docker helps achieve application issues, Application Isolation, and faster development.
What are the best Container Orchestration Tools?
For Container orchestration, different tools are used, few are open-source tools like Kubernetes, and Docker Swarn which can be used privately, also some paid tools are there like AWS ECS from Amazon, Google Containers, and Microsoft Containers. Some of these tools are briefly explained below - 
Amazon ECS
Amazon ECS is yet another product from Amazon Web Services that provides the runtime environment for Docker Containers and orchestrates. It allows running Dockerized applications on top of Amazon's Infrastructure. Click here to learn How to set up DevOps pipeline on AWS?
Azure Container Services
Azure Container Service product is by Microsoft, allowing similar functionalities. It has excellent support for the .NET ecosystem. Click here to know How to build DevOps pipeline on Azure?
Docker Swarm
It's an open-source tool, part of Docker's landscape. This tool can run multiple Docker engines as a single virtual Docker. This is Docker's own containers orchestration Tool. Docker Swarm consists of the manager and worker nodes that run different services for orchestration. Managers that distribute tasks across the cluster and worker node run containers assigned by administrators.
Google Container Engine
Google Container Engine allows us to run Docker containers on the Google Cloud Platform. It schedules the containers into the cluster and manages them as per the requirements. It is built on top of Kubernetes, i.e., an open-source Containers Orchestration tool. Click here to know How to implement DevOps on GCP?
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is one of the most mature orchestration systems for Docker containers. It's an open-source system for automating containerized applications' deployment and management. Also, according to the user's need, it scales the application. Hence, It provides basic mechanisms for deploying, maintaining, and scaling applications. Check out the Guide to Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes
CoreOS Fleet
CoreOS Fleet is a container management tool that lets you deploy Docker containers on hosts in a cluster and distribute services across a cluster.
Cloud Foundry's Diego
Cloud Foundry's Diego is a container management system combining schedulers, runners, and health managers. It is a rewrite of the Cloud Foundry runtime.
Mesosphere Marathon
Mesosphere Marathon is a container orchestration framework for Apache Mesos designed to launch long-running applications. It offers vital features for running applications in a clustered environment.
Encourages collaboration and communication between the developers and operations teams in all stages of the Software Development Life Cycle. Click to explore about, Top Six Challenges in DevOps Adoption
What is Container Scheduling?
Container Scheduling is one of the key features of Container Orchestration. Schedule simply means optimizing, arranging and controlling the task or resources. It includes upgrades, downgrades the resources, rescheduling, placement, scaling, and replication of resources needed to run a container. Container Scheduling also helps in two important aspects -- Auto-Recovery - This means recovering the unhealthy containers required to work applications properly.
- Container Deployments - When a new version of a task definition is uploaded, schedulers automatically stop the containers needed for the previous version and start running the new containers as defined in the uploaded image. Thus allowing easy updating of containers to the latest version.
Continuous Monitoring and Alerting
Monitoring refers to analyze resources and their metrics continuously like CPU, Host, Memory, Storage, Network and take decision accordingly. Like sometimes CPU Utilization goes beyond the limit then we take decision accordingly and also if the host was not working then we can replace it or troubleshoot the host. So, Monitoring works as feedback from the production environment. By doing Monitoring of our application, we can analyze the application’s performance and usage patterns. We Do so to detect the errors and as soon as we found we can immediately correct it.
What are the benefits of Continuous Monitoring?
Given below are the benefits of Continuous Monitoring:
- Effective monitoring is essential to allow its teams to deliver at speed, get feedback from production, and increase customer's satisfaction, acquisition, and retention.
- Monitoring is not only to raise our application, i.e., also found out the out new things, new ideas, analyze the usage data, and figure out new things that can add value to the application.
- Effective Monitoring allows team to deliver the product on time at better speed and also important gets feedback from customers, our primary focus is towards customer satisfaction, we also focus on delivery much better than customer expectation.
- There are many ways for monitoring the application by which it is predicted that application is of usage Monitoring, Availability Monitoring, Performance Monitoring etc.
Serverless Computing Architecture
Serverless Computing is a technology which allows developers to focus only on developing value-adding code and not to concentrate on provisioning or managing servers. Serverless computing relieved developers from worrying about infrastructural and operational details like scalability, high availability, infrastructure, security etc., and allowing developers to do what they enjoy doing, i.e., writing code and creating the "next big thing” and someone else will manage and handle all the issues regarding servers and other infrastructure. Serverless Computing is simply a building code and runs of applications without thinking about servers. “Serverless” doesn’t mean servers are no longer involved. It means the existence of servers is hidden from developers. So, with serverless computing developer shift his focus from server level to coding level. The key benefit of serverless computing is that it encourages Microservices, i.e., dividing complex problems into smaller modules and then solving those modules.
Understanding AWS Lambda
Nowadays, AWS Lambda is the most used platform for Serverless Computing. The developer has just one task, i.e., to provide the code; AWS Lambda takes care of the rest, including managing and provisioning servers.
AWS Lambda Features For Serverless Computing
Given below are the AWS Lambda features for serverless computing:
- It supports various languages, including Node.js, Java, C+, and Python.
- In AWS Lambda, we have to pay only for our computer time and not for the time when the code is not running.
- According to our function memory requirement, Lambda automatically allocates CPU power, network bandwidth, etc., proportionally.
- It provides continuous scaling of our application.
Holistic Approach Toward DevOps Processes
We Started transformation towards its Strategy by adopting processes like Integration of DevOps Tools, Processes, and Data into our work culture. Parallelly, We Started adopting different Infrastructure architectures, Building Private Cloud, Docker, Apache Mesos, and Kubernetes. During Transformation Towards Agile & DevOps, we realized that it needs a platform where we can define a workflow with different Integrations.
- Read here about DevOps on Google Cloud Platform Benefits
- Explore the Role of ML and AI in DevOps Transformation
- Click here to know the Best Continuous Security Testing Tools
- Discover about The Role of Virtualization in DevOps
