What do companies like Flipkart, Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Hotstar and Uber have in common apart from the fact that they are multibillion-dollar giants? They all run their businesses via the internet, if not just apps.
But do you know what constitutes their success more than their predecessors and competitors? It’s the ability to solve any and every technical issue within minutes and roll-out changes or features while continuously testing different things simultaneously.
How are these companies able to pull it off? Of course, they have teams but then they do not end up over-hiring people either. What serves as the ‘backbone’ to their technical success is their use of a method known as ‘DevOps’. This magical method helps them automate their day to day processes to increase efficiency and improve delivery time.
But before your mind starts feeding you with “But they are rich enough to afford these fancy methods and we aren’t” let me interrupt your flow of thoughts by informing you that it’s not expensive if it’s saving you a lot in the long term. So, without further ado let’s get you to know about this actually-not-so-fancy term called ‘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.
My Background: I am Cloud , DevOps & Big Data Enthusiast | 4x AWS Certified | 3x OCI Certified | 3x Azure Certified .
Why DevOps Matters
Software and the Internet have transformed the world and its industries, from shopping to entertainment to banking. Software no longer merely supports a business; rather it becomes an integral component of every part of a business. Companies interact with their customers through software delivered as online services or applications and on all sorts of devices. They also use software to increase operational efficiencies by transforming every part of the value chain, such as logistics, communications, and operations.
In a similar way that physical goods companies transformed how they design, build, and deliver products using industrial automation throughout the 20th century, companies in today’s world must transform how they build and deliver software.
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.
DevOps Practices
The following are DevOps best practices: Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery Microservices Infrastructure as Code Monitoring and Logging Communication and Collaboration
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. The key goals of continuous integration are to find and address bugs quicker, improve software quality, and reduce the time it takes to validate and release new software updates. Learn more about continuous integration »
Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery is a software development practice where code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a release to production. It expands upon continuous integration by deploying all code changes to a testing environment and/or a production environment after the build stage. When continuous delivery is implemented properly, developers will always have a deployment-ready build artifact that has passed through a standardized test process.
Learn more about continuous delivery and AWS CodePipeline »
Microservices
The microservices architecture is a design approach to build a single application as a set of small services. Each service runs in its own process and communicates with other services through a well-defined interface using a lightweight mechanism, typically an HTTP-based application programming interface (API).
Microservices are built around business capabilities; each service is scoped to a single purpose. You can use different frameworks or programming languages to write microservices and deploy them independently, as a single service, or as a group of services.
Learn more about Amazon Container Service (Amazon ECS) »
Learn more about AWS Lambda »
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. The cloud’s API-driven model enables developers and system administrators to interact with infrastructure programmatically, and at scale, instead of needing to manually set up and configure resources. Thus, engineers can interface with infrastructure using code-based tools and treat infrastructure in a manner similar to how they treat application code. Because they are defined by code, infrastructure and servers can quickly be deployed using standardized patterns, updated with the latest patches and versions, or duplicated in repeatable ways.
Learn to manage your infrastructure as code with AWS CloudFormation »
Configuration Management
Developers and system administrators use code to automate operating system and host configuration, operational tasks, and more. The use of code makes configuration changes repeatable and standardized. It frees developers and systems administrators from manually configuring operating systems, system applications, or server software.
Learn how you can configure and manage Amazon EC2 and on-premises systems with Amazon EC2 Systems Manager »
Learn to use configuration management with AWS OpsWorks »
Policy as Code
With infrastructure and its configuration codified with the cloud, organizations can monitor and enforce compliance dynamically and at scale. 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-DSS or HIPAA). This allows teams within an organization to move at higher velocity since non-compliant resources can be automatically flagged for further investigation or even automatically brought back into compliance.
Learn how you can use AWS Config and Config Rules to monitor and enforce compliance for your infrastructure »
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.
Active monitoring becomes increasingly important as services must be available 24/7 and as application and infrastructure update frequency increases. Creating alerts or performing real-time analysis of this data also helps organizations more proactively monitor their services.
Learn how you can use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor your infrastructure metrics and logs »
Learn how you can use AWS CloudTrail to record and log AWS API calls »
Communication and Collaboration
Increased communication and collaboration in an organization is one of the key cultural aspects of DevOps. The use of DevOps tooling and automation of the software delivery process establishes collaboration by physically bringing together the workflows and responsibilities of development and operations. Building on top of that, these teams set strong cultural norms around information sharing and facilitating communication through the use of chat applications, issue or project tracking systems, and wikis.
This 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.
How much does DevOps engineer make?
DevOps is one of the most trending IT profession. That is why there is plenty of opportunities out there. As a result, pay scale even for junior level DevOps engineer is quite high. Approximate salary of Junior DevOps engineer in India is $11,000 to $15,801 per year. The average salary for junior DevOps Engineer is $78,696 per year in the United States of America.
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, the mainstreaming the notion of DevOps will take 5 to 10 years.
I hope that this guide helps you in building your career with DevOps.
If you have any doubt or unable to understand any concept feel free to contact me on LinkedIn. You can view my badges here. If you are interested in learning DevOps then follow me on github. If you liked this content then do clap and share it . Thank You .
“The key in such a transition to continuous delivery is to expect things to get worse before you’ll be able to make them better.” ~ Matthias Marschall