This story is to discuss the process and the framework defined for Software development and delivering it to the end-users/customers.

As discussed in the previous article we follow a systemic procedure to yield proper/better results. SDLC is the basic framework used across all organizations in the process of developing and releasing the software reliably.

As there are a lot of detailed articles regarding SDLC and various steps, I don’t want to go into too much detail about SDLC in this article but I will add the good sources in the links down below this article. On a high level, the framework is formed out of 7 or 8 mandatory steps as below:

Planning/Ideation, Requirement gathering, Designing, Development, Building, Testing, Deployment, Monitoring, and Maintenance.

Check this article which provided a detailed explanation of SDLC.

Software Development Life Cycle was originally published in Journey to DevOps-Absolute Beginner Students on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I intend to write this article for People who have very little/no knowledge of Software development and to provide the idea of how software changed our day-to-day lives. I know many people who feel scared/think the software is not their type or it’s very hard. My Goal, for this article, is to encourage students/people to inject the perspective that we are working to solve problems and help the world, and software is the best tool, although our work might be a 10th of a drop in ocean.

Background on problems and how the software helped:

As we humans have always thrived to make our day-to-day life simple, comfortable, easy, fast, and reliable. We started from how to make fire, grew vegetation, and developed civilization that we are proud of today’s life we lead. I don’t want to bore with known facts, but the point to mention humans choose different ways/tools to solve our problems, and computers/software is the smartest way that we developed and still using to solve problems and make the world a better place.

To give a couple of examples, existing applications we use in day-to-day life today, solved the problems once we faced and drastically improved the quality of our lives, and saves time and money.

Transportation: Uber/lyft/airbnb/instacart — A decade ago, we have cabs, taxi’s to travel between places in the same city charged by miles/hours. Problem: We have to remember the agency name, call, and book the driver at least 12 hours ahead, and if we are lucky we get the cab ride on time. Uber/Lyft identified the problem and solved it with wonderful software and whola.. everybody is happy both drivers and riders and generated millions of jobs as a gig or full time. Similarly Airbnb, Instacart, DoorDash etc.. Always, Remember we are here to solve problems that make life's better/simpler.

Shopping: Amazon/ebay/online shopping — Similar story here as well- going from store-to-store and shopping is old days. Now- buying from home and shop everything at one place and arrives within a couple of days in front of our doorstep is a revolution. Again, work made easy, simple, and comfortable.

Software: Microsoft word/computers — Storing from hard logged files to word documents, excels sheets, emails, skype, zoom, and video games etc.. you name it every other application/software solves a problem and benefit to increase our productivity.

All the above said and done, As long as we have problems in our day-to-day life we can use software to fix that (overrated :)) , So developing a software will also have problems and needs to another solution(software) to fix that problem.

Next question comes, what is the process to develop an app/software that solves the problems.

As common as it is in our normal life, It’s as simple as how we fix a dish/curry to our likes. we check if the dish tastes good and (identify) there may be more or less salt/spice/tangy/bitter . we think of appropriate solution (design) to add lemon or add sugar or more veggies depends on the identified problem. We add the necessary things we designed(implementation) and you taste ( testing) to see if your implemntation(solution) worked and then you may make little changes and test again and we finally had tasty dish as you like.

The process goes as above even for software developement:

we identify the problem and design solution, impelment solution, test the solution and mange the application and repeat the process for any software.

Professionals coined the term SDLC- Software Development Life Cycle to the exact same process we mentioned above and it became the standard procedure.

The next story focuses on SDLC and the different initial tools/languages we use.

Background on Identifying problems and how the Software helped to make the World a Better place. was originally published in Journey to DevOps-Absolute Beginner Students on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Will Look at some good Open Source Cloud Governance tools

Need for Governance:

As Cloud utilization has increased exponentially for the past decade, business needs to have a detailed understanding of cloud expenditure, security, and auditing in accordance with compliance of legal and business entity rules.

Cloud-Custodian — OpenSource Governance Tool:

Cloud Custodian is an OpenSource Governance tool released and managed by A CapitalOne. Documentation to custodian can be found here https://cloudcustodian.io/docs/index.html and GitHub repo url https://github.com/cloud-custodian/cloud-custodian

Cloud Custodian is designed as an internal tool within CapitalOne and then release as Opensource under Apache v2.0 Public license.

It has good integration with AWS and supports the majority of the services in AWS. It does also supports Azure and GCP Clouds and growing to support more services.

Major Areas to implement Governance around cloud utilization:

1- Expenditure/Budget

2- Access/Security

3- Imply the Regulations/Laws

4- Auditing/Resource Management

Cloud Custodian is very easy yet powerful to achieve the desired Governance Rules. It allows us to create policies with a simple Yaml file and place in Rules on the cloud account.

A sample policy below enforces a resource(ec2) in AWS to have a specific tag and if it misses we should mark as uncompliant and mark to stop after ’n’ hours/days. Below example will look for ec2 instances which have any one of the ‘Application’, ‘CostCenter’ and ‘Environment’ tags then it will put a tag on that instance to stop after 1 day.

Custodian Policy will create a custom lambda with a policy we developed in the AWS account.

policies:

- name: ec2-tag-compliance-mark
  resource: ec2
  comment: |
    Find all (non-ASG) instances that are not conformant
    to tagging policies, and tag them for stoppage in 1 days.
  filters:
    - "tag:aws:autoscaling:groupName": absent
    - "tag:noncomplaint": absent
    - or:
        - "tag:Application": absent
        - "tag:CostCenter": absent
        - "tag:Environment": absent
  actions:
    - type: mark-for-op
      op: stop
      days: 1

Will discuss the different the section in the above example:

resource: Defines what kind of resource it falls into either ec2,vpc,elb,s3,rds etc..

filters: policy look for certain tags or cloud trail events to filter the resources.

actions: what action has to be taken on that resource.

op: operations like stop, terminate, start, add tag or remove tag etc..instances

Will discuss furthermore different kind of examples of custodian policies

# retrieve the jnlp slave secret

ruby_block  'jnlp_secret'  do

block do

if File.exists?('c:/jenkins/secret')

node.default['secret'] = File.read('c:/jenkins/secret').chomp

end

end

end

# Download Jenkins service installer XML

template 'c:/jenkins/jenkins_slave.xml' do

source 'jenkins.xml.erb'

action :create

variables(jenkins_server: node['windows']['jenkins_server'],

node_name: node['hostname'],

secret_key: lazy { node['secret'] })

end

Explanation: In the above recipe , we read the value inside in the secret file and assigned to node.default['secret'] variable which is local to the recipe and passed that variable to the template and passed as variable secret_key: lazy {node['secret']} so the template will get the value of the local variable. It will specially help in defining local variables when they are completely dynamic and using as part of chef run time variables.

Chef Lazy variables usage was originally published in DevOps Process and Tools on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

# retrieve the secret stored in azure key vault using this chef recipe

include_recipe 'microsoft_azure'

azurespn = data_bag_item('azurespn', 'azurespnenv')

node.default['azurespn']['client_id'] = azurespn[node.environment]['client_id']

node.default['azurespn']['tenant_id'] = azurespn[node.environment]['tenant_id']

node.default['azurespn']['client_secret'] = azurespn[node.environment]['client_secret']

spn = {

'tenant_id' => "#{node['azurespn']['tenant_id']}",

'client_id' => "#{node['azurespn']['client_id']}",

'secret' => "#{node['azurespn']['client_secret']}"

}

secret = vault_secret("#{node['windowsnode']['vault_name']}", "#{node['windowsnode']['secret']}", spn)

file 'c:/jenkins/secret' do
action :create
content "#{secret}"
rights :full_control, 'Administrators', :one_level_deep => true
end

Chef::Log.info("secret is '#{secret}' ")

Explanation: I am storing the azure spn credentials in databag azurespn and created variable spn hash in the recipe and used vault_secret helpoer method from microsoft_azure cookbook whihc i mentioned in the include statement and storing that secret value retrived from key vault into secret file in the c:/jenkins directory. this specific one is to store on windows node. Linux is pretty straight forward.

Enjoy this cool recipe and you can store and update all your secrets in azure key vault and the chef recipe is gonna get the latest secret when chef-client convergence for every 15 minutes and don’t need to worry about updating datbag_items in the chef server.

Chef recipe to get secret from Azure key vault was originally published in DevOps Process and Tools on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

FROM microsoft/dotnet:2.1-aspnetcore-runtime-alpine AS base
WORKDIR /app 
FROM microsoft/dotnet:2.1-sdk-alpine AS build
WORKDIR /src 
COPY NuGet.Config /root/.nuget/NuGet/NuGet.Config 
RUN apk update \
    && apk add --no-cache curl \ 
    && apk add jq \
    && rm -rf /var/cache/apk/*

Note: You have to provide your own Nuget.config at the same level as this dockerfile and create the image using below command

docker build -t dotnet2.1-alpine Dockerfile

Dotnet Core 2.1 alpine Dockerfile was originally published in DevOps Process and Tools on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Please find the below dockerfile which can build windows docker image with dotnet4.5.2, VS2017, powershell, Nuget and MS Build

# escape=`

FROM microsoft/windowsservercore:ltsc2016

SHELL ["powershell", "-Command", "$ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop'; $ProgressPreference = 'SilentlyContinue';"]

RUN Install-PackageProvider -Name chocolatey -RequiredVersion 2.8.5.130 -Force; `

Install-Package -Name microsoft-build-tools -RequiredVersion 15.0.26228.0 -Force; `

Install-Package -Name netfx-4.5.2-devpack -RequiredVersion 4.5.5165101 -Force; `

Install-Package nuget.commandline -RequiredVersion 3.5.0 -Force;

ENV NUGET_PATH="C:\Chocolatey\lib\NuGet.CommandLine.3.5.0\tools" `

CHOCLATEY_PATH="C:\Chocolatey\bin" `
    MSBUILD_PATH="C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\BuildTools\MSBuild\15.0\Bin"

RUN $env:PATH = $env:NUGET_PATH + ';' + $env:CHOCLATEY_PATH + ';' + $env:MSBUILD_PATH + ';' + $env:PATH; `

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('PATH', $env:PATH, [EnvironmentVariableTarget]::Machine)

ENTRYPOINT ["powershell"]

NOTE: To build windows docker images/run windows containers you need to have same windows operating system with same version.

Error: If you run through the unable to download / reach the server , you might want to check the tls version and add the below line

RUN [Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12;

to the first Run command.

Windows Dotnet framework Dockerfile was originally published in DevOps Process and Tools on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Kubernetes logging with Fluend, Splunk. was originally published in DevOps Process and Tools on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Kubernetes Monitoring using Datadog was originally published in DevOps Process and Tools on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.