DevOps Tutorial Made Simple – The BEST Step-By-Step Guide

Last updated on 29th May 2020, Blog, Tutorials

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a culture which promotes collaboration between the Development and Operations Team to deploy code to production faster in an automated & repeatable way. The word ‘DevOps’ is a combination of two words ‘development’ and ‘operations.’DevOps helps to increase an organization’s speed to deliver 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.

Why is DevOps Needed?

• Before DevOps, the development and operation team worked in complete isolation.
• Testing and Deployment were isolated activities done after design-build. Hence they consumed more time than actual build cycles.
• Without using DevOps, team members are spending a large amount of their time in testing, deploying, and designing instead of building the project.
• Manual code deployment leads to human errors in production
• Coding & operation teams have their separate timelines and are not in sync causing further delays.

There is a demand to increase the rate of software delivery by business stakeholders. As per Forrester Consulting Study, Only 17% of teams can use delivery software fast enough. This proves the pain point.

How is DevOps different from traditional IT

Let’s compare the traditional software waterfall model with DevOps to understand the changes DevOps bring.

We assume the application is scheduled to go live in 2 weeks and coding is 80% done. We assume the application is a fresh launch and the process of buying servers to ship the code has just begun-

Why is DevOps used?

DevOps allows Agile Development Teams to implement Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. This helps them to launch products faster into the market.

Other Important reasons are:

• Predictability: DevOps offers significantly lower failure rate than new releases.
• Reproducibility: Version everything so that earlier versions can be restored anytime.
• Maintainability: Effortless process of recovery in the event of a new release crashing or disabling the current system.
• Time to market: DevOps reduces the time to market up to 50% through streamlined software delivery. This is particularly the case for digital and mobile applications.
• Greater Quality: DevOps helps the team to provide improved quality of application development as it incorporates infrastructure issues.
• Reduced Risk: DevOps incorporates security aspects in the software delivery lifecycle. It helps in reduction of defects across the lifecycle.
• Resiliency: The Operational state of the software system is more stable, secure, and changes are auditable.
• Cost Efficiency: DevOps offers cost efficiency in the software development process which is always an aspiration of IT companies’ management.
• Breaks larger code base into small pieces: DevOps is based on the agile programming method. Therefore, it allows breaking larger code bases into smaller and manageable chunks.

When to adopt DevOps?

DevOps should be used for large distributed applications such as eCommerce sites or applications hosted on a cloud platform.

When not to adopt DevOps?

It should not be used in a mission-critical application like bank, power and other sensitive data sites. Such applications need strict access controls on the production environment, a detailed change management policy, access control policy to the data centers.

DevOps Lifecycle

DevOps is deep integration between development and operations. Understanding DevOps is not possible without knowing DevOps lifecycle.

Here is a brief information about the Continuous DevOps life-cycle:

1. Development

In this DevOps stage the development of software takes place constantly. In this phase, the entire development process is separated into small development cycles. This benefits the DevOps team to speed up software development and delivery processes.

2. Testing

QA teams use tools like Selenium to identify and fix bugs in the new piece of code.

3. Integration :In this stage, new functionality is integrated with the prevailing code, and testing takes place. Continuous development is only possible due to continuous integration and testing.

4. Deployment

In this phase, the deployment process takes place continuously. It is performed in such a manner that any changes made any time in the code, should not affect the functioning of a high traffic website.

5. Monitoring

In this phase, the operation team will take care of the inappropriate system behavior or bugs which are found in production.

DevOps Workflow:

Workflows provide a visual overview of the sequence in which input is provided. It also tells about actions are performed, and output is generated for an operations process.

Workflow allows the ability to separate and arrange jobs which are top-requested by the users. It also gives the ability to mirror their ideal process in the configuration jobs.

How is DevOps different from Agile? DevOps Vs Agile

Stakeholders and communication chain a typical IT process.

DevOps addresses gaps in Developer and IT Operations communications.Despite their similarities, DevOps and agile are not the same, and some argue that DevOps is better than agile. To eliminate the confusion, it’s important to get down to the nuts and bolts.

Similarities

• Both are software development methodologies; there is no disputing this.
• Agile has been around for over 20 years, and DevOps came into the picture fairly recently.
• Both believe in fast software development, and their principles are based on how fast software can be developed without causing harm to the customer or operations.

Differences

• The difference between the two is what happens after development.
• Software development, testing, and deployment happen in both DevOps and agile. However, pure agile tends to stop after these three stages. In contrast, DevOps includes operations, which happen continually. Therefore, monitoring and software development are also continuous.
• In agile, separate people are responsible for developing, testing, and deploying the software. In DevOps, the DevOps engineering role is are responsible for everything; development is operations, and operations is development.
• DevOps is more associated with cost-cutting, and agile is more synonymous with lean and reducing waste, and concepts like agile project accounting and minimum viable product (MVP) are relevant.
• Agile focuses on and embodies empiricism (adaptation, transparency, and inspection) instead of predictive measures.

Agile	DevOps
Feedback from customer	Feedback from self
Smaller release cycles	Smaller release cycles, immediate feedback
Focus on speed	Focus on speed and automation
Not the best for business	Best for business

DevOps Principles

Here, are six principles which are essential when adopting DevOps:

• Customer-Centric Action: DevOps team must take customer-centric action for that they should constantly invest in products and services.
• End-To-End Responsibility: The DevOps team needs to provide performance support until they become end-of-life. This enhances the level of responsibility and the quality of the products engineered.
• Continuous Improvement: DevOps culture focuses on continuous improvement to minimize waste. It continuously speeds up the improvement of product or services offered.
• Automate everything: Automation is a vital principle of DevOps process. This is not only for the software development but also for the entire infrastructure landscape.
• Work as one team: In the DevOps culture role of the designer, developer, and tester are already defined. All they needed to do is work as one team with complete collaboration.
• Monitor and test everything: It is very important for the DevOps team to have robust monitoring and testing procedures.

Who is a DevOps Engineer?

A DevOps Engineer is an IT professional who works with software developers, system operators, and other production IT staff to administer code releases. DevOps should have hard as well as soft skills to communicate and collaborate with development, testing, and operations teams.

DevOps approach needs frequent, incremental changes to code versions, which means frequent deployment and testing regimens. Although DevOps engineers need to code occasionally from scratch, it is important that they should have the basics of software development languages.

A DevOps engineer will work with development team staff to tackle the coding and scripting needed to connect elements of code, like libraries or software development kits.

Roles, Responsibilities, and Skills of a DevOps Engineer

DevOps engineers work full-time. They are responsible for the production and ongoing maintenance of a software application’s platform.

Following are some expected Roles, Responsibilities, and Skills that is expected from DevOps engineer:

• Able to perform system troubleshooting and problem-solving across platform and application domains.
• Manage project effectively through open, standards-based platforms
• Increase project visibility thought traceability
• Improve quality and reduce development cost with collaboration
• Analyse, design and evaluate automation scripts & systems
• Ensuring critical resolution of system issues by using the best cloud security solutions services
• DevOps engineer should have the soft skill of problem-solver and quick-learner

DevOps engineer should have the soft skill of problem-solver and quick-learner.DevOps training certification helps anyone who aspires to make a career as a DevOps Engineer. Certifications are available from Amazon web services, Red Hat, Microsoft Academy, DevOps Institute.

Let’s consider them one by one

This DevOps Engineering certificate tests you on how to use the most common DevOps patterns to develop, deploy, and maintain applications on AWS. It also evaluates you on the core principles of the DevOps methodology.

This certification has 2 requisites. The certification fee is $300 and duration is 170 minutes.

Red Hat Certification:A Red Hat offers different level of certifications for DevOps professionals as follows –

• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Platform-as-a-Service
• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Containerized Application Development
• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Ansible Automation
• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Configuration Management
• Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Container Administration

What is the future of DevOps?

They are lots of Change likely to happens in the DevOps world some most prominent are:

• Organizations are shifting in their needs to weeks and months instead of years.
• We will see soon that DevOps engineers have more access and control of the end user than any other person in the enterprise.
• DevOps is becoming a valued skill for IT people. For example, a survey conducted by Linux hiring found that 25% of respondent’s job seeker is DevOps expertise.
• DevOps and continuous delivery are here to stay. Therefore companies need to change as they have no choice but to evolve. However, mainstreaming the notion of DevOps will take 5 to 10 years.

DevOps Automation Tools

It is vital to automate all the testing processes and configure them to achieve speed and agility. This process is known as DevOps automation.

The difficulty faced in a large DevOps Team that maintains large huge IT infrastructure can be classified briefly into six different categories.

• Infrastructure Automation
• Configuration Management
• Deployment Automation
• Performance Management
• Log Management
• Monitoring

Let’s see a few tools in each of these categories and how they solve the pain points–

Infrastructure Automation

Amazon Web Services (AWS): Being a cloud service you do not need to be physically present in the data center. Also, they are easy to scale on-demand. There are no up-front hardware costs. It can be configured to provision more servers based on traffic automatically.

Configuration Management

Chef: It is a useful DevOps tool for achieving speed, scale, and consistency. It can be used to ease out complex tasks and perform configuration management. With this tool, DevOps team can avoid making changes across ten thousand servers. Instead, they need to make changes in one place which is automatically reflected in other servers.

Deployment Automation

Jenkins: This tool facilitates continuous integration and testing. It helps to integrate project changes more easily by quickly finding issues as soon as a built is deployed.

Log Management

Splunk: This is a tool that solves issues like aggregating, storing, and analyzing all logs in one place.

Performance Management

App Dynamic: It is a DevOps tool which offers real-time performance monitoring. The data collected by this tool helps developers to debug when issues occur.

Monitoring

Nagios: It is also important to make sure people are notified when infrastructure and related services go down. Nagios is one such tool for this purpose which helps DevOps teams to find and correct problems.

How much does a DevOps engineer make?

DevOps is one of the most trending IT professions. That is why there are plenty of opportunities out there. As a result, the pay scale even for junior level DevOps engineers is quite high. Approximate salary of Junior DevOps engineer in India is 11, 15,801 per year. The average salary for junior DevOps Engineer is $78,696 per year in the United States of America.

DevOps Use Case in Netflix

We all know about Netflix, the world’s leading media-subscription provider that streams various TV shows and movies on our favorite smart devices, delivering the best experience anywhere at any time to more than 75 million global customers.

Let’s understand how Netflix uses DevOps to provide its customers with the best and smooth video streaming experience. Netflix uses Spinnaker continuous delivery platform for the continuous delivery of its application. Before reaching Spinnaker, there are a number of steps that are supposed to take place.

Let’s understand this from the diagram below:

Before going with Spinnaker for deployment, the code has to be first built and then tested.

A Simple Java Application Build.gradle File

Netflix uses Nebula for the build; it considers Nebula as the best build tool for Java applications. It is a collection of Gradle plugins meant for Netflix engineers to eliminate boilerplate build logic and provide same conventions.

Further, the code is tested locally using Nebula. The changes, if any, are committed to their central Git repository. Also, Netflix migrates its monolith application to the cloud-based microservices in AWS. The microservice architecture allows teams at Netflix to be loosely coupled, building and pushing changes at a speed they are comfortable with.

A Jenkins job is created that helps execute Nebula, which further builds, tests, and packages the application for further deployment. The build is further ‘baked’ into an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). For generating AMIs from the source, Netflix creates a bakery, and the bakery exposes an API that facilitates the creation of AMIs globally.Once the baking is complete, Spinnaker comes into the picture that helps in deployment by making the resultant AMIs available for the tens, hundreds, and thousands of instances.

After this continuous integration, deployment, and final availability, the application goes live.

DevOps Engineers are among the highest paid professionals in the technology domain! 

Since we thoroughly understand what DevOps is and how it works, now, we need to know the skill set a DevOps Engineer should possess.

Job Opportunities in DevOps

DevOps opens up a huge world of career options. If we are skillful enough and certified, we can go for any of the below-mentioned profiles and bag high salaries.

• DevOps Evangelist: Identifies the benefits coming from DevOps and thus aids in the promotion of DevOps
• Code Release Manager: Understands the Agile methodology and supervises the overall progress
• Automation Architect: Designs and builds automated tools and systems to implement continuous and smooth deployments
• Experience Assurance: Enhances user experience by finding bugs and including all the essential features in the applications
• Software Developer/Tester: Makes sure that the code meets all the original business requirements, along with performs testing and monitoring
• Security Engineer: Integrates security into the applications and products to keep the business safe.