Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:
- Identify the benefits of DevOps for organizations
- Define DevOps toolchain steps in detail
- Create a modern DevOps pipeline running on GitHub
This chapter gives an introduction to DevOps. This chapter will briefly explain what DevOps is and the concepts around it
Introduction
In the last decade, several comprehensive paradigm shifts have taken place in the software industry. These changes have made it possible for millions of people to chat on their mobile phones at the same time and stream their favorite movies while traveling throughout the world. When changes in software development and operations are reviewed, two prominent, mutually reinforcing paradigms come to the forefront: DevOps and cloud-native architecture. DevOps created a cultural change by establishing more open communication between teams. This cultural change led to practices such as continuous integration, testing, and deployment, which shaped today's software development methodology. Likewise, cloud-native architecture created an open environment with scalable microservices capable of serving millions of customers. In order to manage this scalability, container technologies have evolved for the development, testing, and deployment of applications. These two paradigm shifts have enabled today's robust, scalable, and easy-to-manage software applications to change the technological, social, and industrial face of the world.
Before diving into innovative software development methods, let's have a glance at a conventional approach. Traditionally, software development was similar to manufacturing a passenger aircraft. Considerable investments in infrastructure and personnel followed the collection of requirements, design, and planning. There were teams identical to production-line engineers and workers that specialized in a particular topic and delivered parts of the aircraft for the next stages. There were even companies with organizational structures including teams named "production line." Prodigious output was delivered to customers following formal acceptance tests. After that, it was the customer's responsibility to make the aircraft fly with its team of engineers and operators. Further requests and upgrades were part of another substantial project.
Today, software development has evolved and become more customer-oriented. It has moved away from making customers buy software products by having customers subscribe to software services. A similar thing could be said for the aircraft analogy: software applications are smaller and more flexible, like drones. Requirements are collected at every stage, and the product is configured to the customer's environment "on the fly." Since customers also buy the product as a service, maintenance and keeping drones in the air is the job of the producer. In order to manage these services, microservice orchestrators such as Kubernetes make these small drones run in harmony to achieve more complex air shows. These changes in software development and operations owe their success to the cultural shift of DevOps and containerized cloud-native technologies.
DevOps' Effect on Industry
Leading companies such as PayPal, Facebook, and Netflix have very strong DevOps success stories that have evolved over the years. For instance, Paypal has more than 200 million active users, with nearly 5,000 developers. In 2013, creating a new application on PayPal required opening dozens of tickets and following their complex statuses for months instead of writing code. To resolve this problem, PayPal developed a software development lifecycle system to manage the complete lifecycle of software, going from planning to production in a couple of weeks.
Likewise, Facebook focused on code ownership, automation, and continuous improvement way before DevOps became popular. Today, Facebook uses the Chef configuration management tool to manage all of its infrastructure and backend systems. Similarly, Netflix created an environment where thousands of changes are made to production each day. It both decreased the time taken to fix problems and increased its market responsiveness.
When old and new software development practices are compared, it is evident that the old mindset of conventional software development is doomed to fail. Running scalable, reliable, and robust applications on cloud providers that can scale to serve millions of customers requires learning and applying new methodologies. The basics of these methodologies include learning the basics of DevOps culture and toolchain and container technology. Following that, it is essential to learn and exercise how to install, configure, scale, and monitor containerized applications inside the de facto container orchestrator, Kubernetes.
In this chapter, the inception of the DevOps cultural shift and its value toolchain are explored. How DevOps changed the software development environment and potential benefits for organizations are covered. Following that, every step of a complete DevOps toolchain will be discussed, starting from the plan for a software project to monitoring an installed application. All toolchain steps are presented and experimented on with a modern cloud-native application suitable for today's software trends.
DevOps Cu...
