DevOps

What is DevOps?

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.

How does DevOps work?

A DevOps team includes developers and IT operations working collaboratively throughout the product lifecycle, in order to increase the speed and quality of software deployment. It’s a new way of working, a cultural shift, that has significant implications for teams and the organizations they work for.

Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams are no longer “siloed.” Sometimes, these two teams merge into a single team where the engineers work across the entire application lifecycle — from development and test to deployment and operations — and have a range of multidisciplinary skills.

DevOps teams use tools to automate and accelerate processes, which helps to increase reliability. A DevOps toolchain helps teams tackle important DevOps fundamentals including continuous integration, continuous delivery, automation, and collaboration.

DevOps values are sometimes applied to teams other than development. When security teams adopt a DevOps approach, security is an active and integrated part of the development process. This is called DevSecOps.

Benefits of DevOps

• Speed: Move at high velocity so you can innovate for customers faster, adapt to changing markets better, and grow more efficient at driving business results. The DevOps model enables your developers and operations teams to achieve these results. For example, microservices and continuous delivery let teams take ownership of services and then release updates to them quicker.
• Rapid Delivery: Increase the frequency and pace of releases so you can innovate and improve your product faster. The quicker you can release new features and fix bugs, the faster you can respond to your customers’ needs and build competitive advantage. Continuous integration and continuous delivery are practices that automate the software release process, from build to deploy.
• Reliability :Ensure the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes so you can reliably deliver at a more rapid pace while maintaining a positive experience for end users. Use practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery to test that each change is functional and safe. Monitoring and logging practices help you stay informed of performance in real-time.
• Scale: Operate and manage your infrastructure and development processes at scale. Automation and consistency help you manage complex or changing systems efficiently and with reduced risk. For example, infrastructure as code helps you manage your development, testing, and production environments in a repeatable and more efficient manner.
• Improved Collaboration: Build more effective teams under a DevOps cultural model, which emphasizes values such as ownership and accountability. Developers and operations teams collaborate closely, share many responsibilities, and combine their workflows. This reduces inefficiencies and saves time (e.g. reduced handover periods between developers and operations, writing code that takes into account the environment in which it is run).
• Security: Move quickly while retaining control and preserving compliance. You can adopt a DevOps model without sacrificing security by using automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques. For example, using infrastructure as code and policy as code, you can define and then track compliance at scale.

What is a DevOps tool?

DevOps Tool is an application that helps automate the software development process. It mainly focuses on communication and collaboration between product management, software development, and operations professionals. DevOps tool also enables teams to automate most of the software development processes like build, conflict management, dependency management, deployment, etc. and helps reduce manual efforts.

DevOps tools

1. Puppet: Puppet is the most widely used DevOps tool. It allows the delivery and release of the technology changes quickly and frequently. It has features of versioning, automated testing, and continuous delivery. It enables to manage entire infrastructure as code without expanding the size of the team.
2. Ansible: Ansible is a leading DevOps tool. Ansible is an open-source IT engine that automates application deployment, cloud provisioning, intra service orchestration, and other IT tools. It makes it easier for DevOps teams to scale automation and speed up productivity.
3. Docker: Docker is a high-end DevOps tool that allows building, ship, and run distributed applications on multiple systems. It also helps to assemble the apps quickly from the components, and it is typically suitable for container management.
4. Nagios: Nagios is one of the more useful tools for DevOps. It can determine the errors and rectify them with the help of network, infrastructure, server, and log monitoring systems.
5. CHEF: A chef is a useful tool for achieving scale, speed, and consistency. The chef is a cloud-based system and open source technology. This technology uses Ruby encoding to develop essential building blocks such as recipes and cookbooks. The chef is used in infrastructure automation and helps in reducing manual and repetitive tasks for infrastructure management. Chef has got its convention for different building blocks, which are required to manage and automate infrastructure.
6. Jenkins: Jenkins is a DevOps tool for monitoring the execution of repeated tasks. Jenkins is a software that allows continuous integration. Jenkins will be installed on a server where the central build will take place. It helps to integrate project changes more efficiently by finding the issues quickly.
7. Git: Git is an open-source distributed version control system that is freely available for everyone. It is designed to handle minor to major projects with speed and efficiency. It is developed to co-ordinate the work among programmers. The version control allows you to track and work together with your team members at the same workspace. It is used as a critical distributed version-control for the DevOps tool.
8. SALTSTACK: Stackify is a lightweight DevOps tool. It shows real-time error queries, logs, and more directly into the workstation. SALTSTACK is an ideal solution for intelligent orchestration for the software-defined data center.
9. Splunk: Splunk is a tool to make machine data usable, accessible, and valuable to everyone. It delivers operational intelligence to DevOps teams. It helps companies to be more secure, productive, and competitive.
10. Selenium: Selenium is a portable software testing framework for web applications. It provides an easy interface for developing automated tests.

How DevOps can benefit from AI/ML?

AI and machine learning (ML) are still maturing in their applications for DevOps, but there is plenty for organizations to take advantage of today, including using the technology to make sense of test data.

AI and ML can find patterns, figure out the coding problems that cause bugs, and alert DevOps teams so they can dig deeper.

Similarly, DevOps teams can use AI and ML to sift through security data from logs and other tools to detect breaches, attacks, and more. Once these issues are found, AI and ML can respond with automated mitigation techniques and alerting.

AI and ML can save developers and operations professionals time by learning how they work best, making suggestions within workflows, and automatically provisioning preferred infrastructure configurations.