DevOps
The ultimate beginners guide to learn DevOps step-by-step
Mark Reed
Copyright 2019All rights reserved.
It is not legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Table of Contents
Introduction
It is evident that technology has changed the society at large. Today we live, work, and communicate in ways that seemed incomprehensible only a decade ago. For instance, consider the influence cloud technology has had on information technology. While all the changes resulting from technological advancement are good for business, the new digital technologies also present different challenges for IT and their users. For instance, the high demand for real-time communications and instant software updates have triggered core changes in the IT operations paradigm. Due to such changes, companies are under pressure to get their applications up and running within the shortest time possible.
Notably, IT has facilitated the need to adopt quicker and more agile software management frameworks. As a result, IT life cycles have shortened as applications become more complex. This has in turn facilitated the need for cross-collaboration and integration between different IT constituents such as development, operations, and quality assurance. The result: a new IT discipline referred to as DevOps.
So, the obvious questions to ask at this point are What is DevOps? Does your organization leverage DevOps today? What measures have you put in place to ensure efficient workflows, increased revenue generation, and faster production cycles in your business or company? This book seeks to answer these questions and more, as well as any other questions that beginners have about DevOps. By the time you are done reading this book, you will understand what DevOps is, why your organization needs it, its different applications, and its importance in the modern IT-driven business environment.
DevOps facilitates effective communication and collaboration across an organization. This allows businesses to produce and improve products at a faster rate than they would have if using traditional approaches. Collaboration builds stronger, more productive, and happier teams that are solely focused on end product quality and performance. Operations become seamless, since every individual works towards a common goal. High efficiency not only accelerates development but also streamlines the entire process, making it less prone to costly and time consuming errors. DevOps tasks can be automated, leaving software engineers with more time to focus on executing other, non-automated tasks. This, partly, facilitates the agile relationship between operations departments and system development departments as created by DevOps. Such collaborations offer technically effective results that favor both users and customers.
The industry has set the bar and is implementing DevOps at a high rate. Conversely, organizations are eager to take advantage of the enhanced innovation, stable operations environment, faster application delivery, and building performance-oriented work teams with the aim of maximizing profits. Therefore, it is paramount to understand the essential factors about DevOps and its application in the current business environment. Despite how different people are, all the differences must be set aside when it comes to company management and operations. People must work as one unit in order to achieve the core company goals which are excellent customer service and offering solutions to industry specific problems. If everyone can imbibe this organizational work culture philosophy and take time to understand DevOps, it will be easier to create invaluable workplace practices that value people over profits and processes. Indulge to learn DevOps essentials that you should know!
Chapter One: What Is DevOps?
In simple terms, DevOps refers to a set of practices configured to combine information technology operations with software development to shorten the system development life cycle needed to achieve high-quality software. The word DevOps is derived from development and operation, which is used to describe the agile relationship that exists between IT operations and software development with an aim to develop better communication in the two fields.
How Was DevOps Derived?
DevOps was initially derived from agile software development in an attempt to keep up with the increased software velocity achieved through the use of agile methods. Moreover, the advancement of the agile culture comprising other prevailing methods over the years has given rise to more holistic approaches to software development that focus on an end-to-end software delivery cycle. Agile software development is essentially a hypernym, and it is used to describe the group of software production strategies built around this systemic approach. It is a methodology that combines two software improvement methods in the industry, one incremental and the other, iterative, into a single system to more efficiently and effectively produce and roll out technological products. These agile methodologies include extreme programming (XP), Lean Development, Kanban, scrum, and scaled agile.
There are many unique agile methodologies, and while there are specific approaches and scenarios suited for each particular method, the different methods all still share the same primary implementation and core values, which derive the similarity between them. They all incorporate an iterative-centered style embedded with a form of a feedback channel for the evolution of projects and software. The methods that consist of feedback channels specifically are considered as the subparts of the main software project. These subparts are responsible for continuous testing, planning, and integration throughout both the software development and deployment process to ensure the unceasing evolution of the software. Moreover, they are regarded as lightweight when compared to the initial and more traditional waterfall-style processes, which are inherently adaptable for reinvention. What is good about agile methods is the fact that it has a primary impact on empowering the people towards making an informed decision effectively.
Initially, agile teams were made up of aggressive and innovative developers, which make these methods popular because of their efficiency and effectiveness when handling the in-depth nature of software development. The aggressiveness and innovation put in place by the agile team ensured that the desired goal was achieved by the organization in question. They create a competitive advantage in the market through unique service delivery, which cannot be easily emulated by other experts. Though the agile team works along with the quality assurance team, these people in particular are responsible for the organizations product output, which makes their service more distinct than others. Instead, they outgrow the quality assurance team in order to deliver an increased velocity software, which ensures that the idea is brought into reality by the experts. Furthermore, the DevOps team focuses on the standardization of the services, which creates an automated environment to improve the software service delivery to potential customers and users in general. It is all about the efficiency, security, and sustainability of the software to ensure that there are no hiccups in the system.
