A Comprehensive Guide to DevOps & It’s Tools Ecosystem

In today’s business world, success extensively depends on three primary factors. Stability, Scalability, and Adaptability. In order to keep these three aligned with their business processes, enterprises face eternal challenges. The concept of DevOps in enterprises is considered as more of a difficulty than an opportunity for optimization of business operations. Before going into the real topic, let’s check few stats. As per a report of Cloud Expo, (Europe) — 67% of the SMEs & 47% enterprises have adopted DevOps in their product engineering services. 31% of the SMEs have adopted DevOps across the entire organization. Implementing such a radical change in the workplace is a tough task. But in order to stay competitive and agile in the business, you need to identify your starting point. By understanding your vision, you can define a roadmap to achieve your DevOps goals and business outcomes. You must address DevOps implementation challenges related to either tools or processes before it becomes the new work culture.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a combination of practices, which automates the processes between software development and operations teams, in order to build, test, and deploy applications faster. The concept of DevOps is endowed with developing a culture of collaboration between teams that operated in relative silos within the organization. The benefits of DevOps accommodate faster software releases, optimized processes, enhanced trust, and ability to resolve critical issues quickly and better serve your customers.

Now let’s see what DevOps is not;

• DevOps is not a tool or software
• DevOps is not a separate team
• DevOps is not just blending Development & Operations teams

But, DevOps is a never-ending process of continual improvement.

Why You Need DevOps?

With higher collaboration, security, stability and productivity, DevOps could be just what your business needs to surpass your competition when it comes to performance and customer service. All the above benefits of DevOps are measurable and can be used as a primary selling tool for your company. We all want to have a business which is quick, innovative and reliable. Companies need DevOps because it enables them to launch products in the market quickly. Companies using DevOps, deploy more frequently, have shorter lead time, lesser failure rate, and faster recovery rates. DevOps guarantee problems are fixed at every stage, instead of struggling at the end of a project. As teams spend less time dealing with fixing bugs and dealing with unplanned works, DevOps teams can spend more time on innovation and value addition. This means more products put on the market with utmost quality and security. DevOps is a management culture that will enhance your organizational IT service delivery agility on the basis of:

How DevOps Really Works?

In a DevOps model: development & operations teams are not siloed. These two teams are joined into a single unit where people work across the entire project lifecycle, starting from development to test & deployment to operations. DevOps based on developing a spectrum of skills not limited to a single role.

In few other DevOps models, multiple other teams like (QA, security, support) also integrate with development and operations teams during the software development lifecycle. All these teams work together using practices in order to automate processes which historically has been manual. DevOps team use technology stack and tools which assist them to operate and develop applications quickly. These tools also help each individual to accomplish his/her task without seeking any help from others. This increases productivity, velocity and reduces a lot of time & cost.

How To Achieve DevOps?

As we already discussed, DevOps is a continuous process. It is an Agile alliance between development & operations. DevOps process practiced by various teams like development, operations, QA right from the starting of the product design to production support. To understand DevOps, you need to understand the following first.

Continuous Development

In DevOps, during this stage, software development takes place without any pause. The entire development process is subdivided into smaller development cycles. Each individual performs his task simultaneously, so ultimately the entire product takes lesser time to be developed and deployment can happen at the earliest. Continuous development includes coding then creating different forms of the code using SVN, Git and then protecting the code into a folder to process it to the QA team for testing.

Continuous Testing

The QA team then use various tools like Selenium, JUnit etc. to fix the bugs while testing the developed software. They ensure there are no further bugs or flaws in the features and functionalities in the developed software. Testing several sections of the code takes place continuously and when all the components are tested, it is integrated with the primary codes.

Continuous Integration

Continuous integration is a software development practice where developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository, after which automated builds and tests are run. During this stage of the DevOps lifecycle, any code offering a new functionality is being integrated with the prevailing code. Since continuous development & testing take place, updating the new code and integration must be allied. The updated code must ensure zero mess as once the new code is added, you can’t have errors at the runtime. Continuous testing plays an important role in ensuring the new code doesn’t break the developed software. Various tools are being used for continuous integration. Jenkins is one of the widely used tools. Jenkins triggers any change made in the code automatically.

Continuous Deployment

At the stage, the software is deployed to the production. All the developed codes are deployed to the servers ensuring 100% accuracy and reliability. As the development process takes place continuously, various automation tools like SaltStack, Puppet, and Chef, etc. are being used for continuous deployment. This process of continuous deployment must ensure it should not affect the runtime of the code even any change in the code occurs. During this process, the system admin should keep on scaling up the servers in order to manage the higher rate of traffic or users.

Containers and Microservices

Container usage for development pipeline of a software product built using microservices architecture are rapidly becoming the norm for enterprise organizations. Developers use them in many tasks, from app delivery to the migration of legacy systems to cloud servers. Container and microservices enable agility, speed and resource efficiency for many tasks that developers work on daily. The report says 64 percent of technology professionals expect the mainstream use of containers this year and 89 percent are either already using or interested in using microservices.

But what exactly are they?

• Containers are lightweight, scalable and isolated VMs in which you run your applications. They speed up workload processes and application delivery because they can be spun up quickly. They also provide a solution for application-portability challenges because they are not tied to software on physical machines. You can link containers together, set security policies, limit resource utilization and more.
• Microservices are single-function applications comprise small, self-contained units working together through APIs that are not dependent on a specific language. A microservices architecture is faster and more agile than a traditional application architecture. Innovative businesses are using microservices approach because it enables the introduction of new applications that are independently deployable without disrupting the rest of the business. This modular approach can make it easier for companies to spread their workloads across multiple development teams spanning different departments or businesses, offering a greater degree of flexibility and helping to speed up the project lifecycle. The three defining characteristics of microservices to keep in mind are stateless, distributed, and independent.

Considering that each service is lightweight compared to the monolith architecture, it does not make sense to run each microservice on a separate computer. So microservices run with the next evolution of the virtualization technology , the Docker containers — the operating system, not the physical hardware, is virtualized. Each component has its own allocated storage, memory or CPU resources, which makes hardware utilization simple to provision and track.

A simple microservice model

Java gives us Write Once Run Anywhere (WORA) because of the common abstraction provided by Java Virtual Machine. Docker nicely complements WORA by defining a way to package applications, and include all the configuration in an easy to describe format. This can be called as Package Once Deploy Anywhere, or PODA.

Thus, Docker containers solve the problem of running software when it has been moved from one computing environment by essentially isolating it from its environment and further reduce the cost of managing them:

• Developers have direct access to the non-production environments for service deployment giving them greater flexibility and velocity.
• Deploying a new service instance takes minutes rather than days in VMs
• Utilizing the user and role management from Docker Swarm helps to keep access to the service more transparent.
• Higher services density decreases the overall spend on all environments.
• Docker image is built from the base OS every time it needs to run, the patches for OS and libraries appear automatically and quickly, thus increasing security.

On the other hand, running a service in isolation from other services greatly improves the overall system stability. And with a caching layer and a queuing system be able to process tasks asynchronously and quickly share data between the services. Multiple instances of each microservice spanning multiple servers to make it highly available in a production environment comes with below challenges:

• Service discovery
• Load balancing
• Secrets/configuration/storage management
• Scheduling
• Health checks
• Auto-[scaling/restart/healing] of containers and nodes
• Zero-downtime deploys

This is where container orchestration platforms become extremely useful and powerful, because they offer a solution for most of those challenges.

Container Orchestration with Kubernetes CI/CD

Container Orchestration refers to the automated arrangement, coordination, and management of these software containers. Today, the main players are Kubernetes, AWS ECS and Docker Swarm, in order of popularity.

Serverless Architecture

Serverless is a development approach that replaces long-running virtual machines with compute power that comes into existence on demand and disappears immediately after use. Serverless architectures help to reduce the development time and get the products to the market faster. Developers can focus on their core product instead of worrying about managing and operating servers or runtimes, either in the cloud or on-premises. However, serverless may not be an ideal solution for applications where speed is paramount. For large-scale and complex long-running applications requiring a high level of control over the environment, containers and microservices approach is the best fit.

AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions and OpenWhisk are some of the main providers. Also toolkit like Serverless allows developers to jump from one provider to another more easily.

Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as code is a practice in which infrastructure is provisioned and managed using code and software development techniques, such as version control and continuous integration. Engineers can interface with infrastructure using code based tools and treat infrastructure in a manner similar to how they treat application code. This helps with delivering secure and stable application hosting platforms and easy to automate for seamless delivery.

Configuration Management

Using code to automate operating system and host configuration, operational tasks, and more, it frees the IT team from manually configuring them.

Policy as Code

As infrastructure and its configuration codified, organizations can monitor and enforce compliance dynamically. Infrastructure that is described by code can thus be tracked, validated, and reconfigured in an automated way. This makes it easier for organizations to govern changes over resources and ensure that security measures are properly enforced in a distributed manner (e.g. information security or compliance with PCI, etc.).

Monitoring and Logging

Organizations monitor metrics and logs to see how application and infrastructure performance impacts the experience of their product’s end user. By capturing, categorizing, and then analyzing data and logs generated by applications and infrastructure, organizations understand how changes or updates impact users, shedding insights into the root causes of problems or unexpected changes. Creating alerts or performing real-time analysis of this data also helps organizations more proactively monitor their services.

Communication and Collaboration

Increased communication and collaboration in an organization is one of the key cultural aspects of DevOps. Tools like Atlassian JIRA suites helps speed up communication across developers, operations, and even other teams like marketing or sales, allowing all parts of the organization to align more closely on goals and projects.

DevOps Stages and Toolchains

Traditional software development processes were following 4 stages — plan, develop, test, & deploy. But, there are actually more than 4 stages which are not been highlighted. When it comes to DevOps, there are more stages considering the tools, which enables a seamless automation flow from planning to production. Automation is without any doubt a significant part of the flow and enables the process to be highly efficient, repeatable, and robust. Automation is actually an enabler for continuous everything, in each step of the DevOps process. When it comes to Toolchains, various companies use various tools. Now let’s discuss the 7 stages of DevOps.

1. Plan

This stage is composed of two phases: Define and Plan. This stage refers to the business value and application requirements. Considering agile process, you should use tools that allow your development team to plan in iterations. You can learn from the users at an early stage and can optimize the product. Always consider tools that offer sprint planning features. During this stage, it is necessary that everyone can share and discuss anything: ideas, strategies, goals, requirements, roadmaps, and documentation. This phase includes:

• Production metrics, objects and feedback
• Requirements
• Business metrics
• Update release metrics
• Release plan, timing and business case
• Security policy and requirement

A number of IT personnel will be involved in these practices: developers, architects, security officers, continual release management etc.

Tools: JIRA

JIRA by Atlassian is an Agile-friendly planning tool. JIRA supports sprint planning with out-of-the-box or customizable Kanban and Scrum workflows. JIRA software integrates with complex enterprise platforms and is well-suited for planning DevOps workflows that require continuous feedback loops, collaboration with multiple project teams, and open communication.

Other tools used: Rally, Trac, Redmine, XMind, Adobe XD, Zeplin, draw.io, Slack

2. Create

The second phase of DevOps is create. This is comprised of building, coding, and configuring the development process. Tools used in this category often overlap with other categories. As DevOps is breaking silos down, this impact the activities and solutions. Activities which comes under this stage are;

• Design of the software and configuration
• Coding including code quality and performance
• Software build and build performance
• Release candidate

Tools used: Gradle, Apache Maven, Grunt, WebPack, Github, Bitbucket, Docker, BuildMaster, Slack

3. Test

Testing is one of those functionalities which had shift left due to DevOps. The quality aspect of the software depends on the efficiency of testing. As continuous integration has numerous goals for the testing phase, testing should be always automated to assure a seamless flow, sharp and detailed results, and fair affirmation of the application. Early stage testing, initial validation and frequent testing ensure quality built-in to the application can be verified and issues to be tackled early. Testing is directly associated with ensuring the quality of the software release; activities designed to ensure code quality is maintained and the highest quality is deployed to the production. The main activities in this are:

• Acceptance testing
• Regression testing
• Security and vulnerability analysis
• Performance
• Configuration testing

Tools used: JIRA issue tracking, Bugzilla, Selenium, Mocha, Jasmine, JUnit, NUnit, JMeter, pytest, BlazeMeter, Load Impact

4. Packaging

Packaging phase starts once the release is ready for deployment. This stage is often referred to as Preproduction/preprod. The packaging stage comprises tools for package repositories and other storage mechanisms for the binaries created in the development stage. Repositories, also known as artifact or asset repositories — include all assets needed and connected with binaries to facilitate the deployment, such as scripts, configuration files, and additional infrastructural files. Packaging consists of following activities;

• Approval/preapprovals
• Package configuration
• Triggered releases
• Release staging and holding

Tools used: Dockers, consul.io, Ansible, SaltStack, Puppet, Chef

5. Release

Release includes schedule, orchestration, provisioning and deploying software into production and targeted environment. Part of this process is application release automation tools that help up the packaging and deploying the application from development to production, using automation. The specific Release activities include:

• Release coordination
• Deploying and promoting applications
• Fallbacks and recovery
• Scheduled/timed releases

Tools: Jenkins, Kubernetes CI/CD

Jenkins is an open source automation server that offers a plugin architecture to support continuous integration and delivery. It integrates with a variety of software tools in the CI/CD toolchain and distributes work across multiple platforms. In DevOps, Jenkins is been used for packaging, release, and configuration.

Kubernetes is an open-source platform for automating deployments, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts, providing container-centric infrastructure.

Other tools used: Dockers, Docker Hub, Docker Swarm, Travis CI, consul.io, Ansible, SaltStack, Puppet, Chef

6. Configure

Configure comes under the operation side of DevOps. Once the software is deployed, you need additional IT infrastructure and configuration. Configuration tools aim to allow the creation of better applications with flexibility, less downtime, and enhancing an overall cost effectiveness for the business. This approach is intended to reduce as many things creating complexity as possible by removing manual configurations. Automation and collaboration are the epicenters in DevOps and this is the reason why configuration is also widely automated across development flows. Specific configuration activities include;

• Infrastructure storage, database and network provisioning and configuring
• Application provision and configuration

Tools used: Dockers, Jenkins, Kubernetes CI/CD, consul.io, Ansible, SaltStack, Puppet, Chef

7. Monitor

Monitoring is an essential section in a DevOps process. It allows IT team to identify specific issues of specific releases and to know the impact on end-users. There is also an important aspect of making sure organization gets (only) valid data about the process, results in each step, and the outcome.

Monitor related activities are:

• Performance of IT infrastructure
• End-user response and experience
• Production metrics and statistics

Tools: New Relic

New Relic is SaaS web and mobile application performance monitoring tool that gives analytics from the customer experience perspective. It monitors availability, alerting, and notifications in real time for applications running in the cloud, on-premise, or hybrid environments.

Other tools used: Firebase Analytics, crashlytics, ELK stack — Data/BI analytics, Sumologic, Nagios, JIRA, Telegram, Slack

Conclusion

The software industry is adapting DevOps at a rapid pace. Enterprises are eager to take the benefits of quicker application development, testing, and deploying at a high rate of innovation and with a more steady operating environment. DevOps is making teams more flexible and productive. BangBit’s open-source DevOps experts can help you accelerate application development process and offer you a greater development cycle visibility. Contact us today to scale your business and choose the right set of tools in order to embrace DevOps in your organization.