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Are you interested in exploring a career in DevOps? We have curated a bunch of questions for you to get started:
To describe in simple terms, DevOps is a combination of different software development best practices as well as tools that are used for enhancing the capability of organizations during the process of delivering applications, services, in accordance with specific business objectives.
The basic differences between DevOps and Agile are:
| DevOps | Agile |
|---|---|
| A set of practices directed toward both development and operations | A set of repetitive steps mainly focused on the development |
| Involved in managing end-to-end engineering activities | Involved in conducting complex processes |
| Operations are targeted at all levels of business | Targets only the software development area |
| Guarantees shorter release cycles, with ongoing error detection | Follows standard Agile release cycles |
| Depends on internal feedback | Depends on client feedback |
| Some common tools: Chef, AWS, and Puppet | Some common tools: Bugzilla, JIRA, and Kanboard |
All processes observed in a DevOps environment is correlated with an aim to bring development teams and processes together for better development of software. DevOps experts are dedicated to empowering enterprises to create and better their products at a faster pace as compared to the conventional methods of software development.
DevOps benefit businesses by facilitating faster innovations with shorter development and release cycles, leveling up the communication and collaboration standards in a workplace, thereby helping them experience stabilized and enhanced operational efficiencies. That’s not all; DevOps also promises reduced failures in the deployment stage, bringing down the overall operation costs.
The key components of DevOps are Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Microservices, Infrastructure as Code, Monitoring & Logging, and Communication & Collaboration.
In DevOps, the entire core operations are categorized into application development and infrastructure. The Application Development aspect comprise operations such as code building and coverage, Unit testing, Packaging, and Software Deployment. On the other hand, the Infrastructure area consists of Provisioning, Configuration, Orchestration, and Deployment.
The most common DevOps include Git, which is a Version Control System tool; Jenkins, a Continuous Integration tool; Docker, which is a Containerization tool; Puppet, a Configuration Management and Deployment tool; Ansible, which is a Configuration Management and Deployment tool, and Nagios, a Continuous Monitoring tool.
The key performance indicators (KPIs) of DevOps revolve around frequency and failure of deployment; change in failure rate, lead time, and volume; the mean time to detection, recovery, and between failures; efficiency and performance rate; and pipeline adoption.
In DevOps, the term “toolchain” is used to describe a stack of tools, which are deployed in order to automate the more repetitive tasks of application development and deployment. Automating these processes drastically reduces unwanted complexity and errors, while observing the practice of continuous delivery.
Amazon Web Services or AWS is comprised of multiple essential services that have proven helpful for the successful implementation of a DevOps environment. AWS services are responsible for the automation of manual actions, while the human effort can be leveraged in managing the actions that demand brainstorming and innovative thinking. Besides, engineers can now keep the environment stable even in the high-velocity circumstances.
Version Control Systems (VCS) are software tools that help report specific changes in the code and accordingly integrate them with the existing code. In a DevOps scenario, changes in code is a frequent action. Therefore, VCS tools are exceptionally helpful in seamless integration of these changes into the primary code, without hampering the other simultaneous actions of other team members. Apart of code integration, these tools are also capable of testing the code and eliminate bugs, if the need arises. There are three primary types of VCS—Local VCS, Centralized VCS, and Distributed VCS.
The primary benefits a VCS offers to a DevOps team includes easy availability of the entire change history of every file, along with complete independence of past versions as well as variants inside the VCS. This history is kept independent with the aid of a branching strategy and can be merged with the files’ contents in order to verify and validate the changes.
Git can be defined as a distributed VCS, which is particularly used for tracking and recording the changes within the source code during the software development process. Git helps developers manage a project or sets of files that are subject to frequent change and stores all information in a data structure, commonly called the repository.
Thanks to Git, developers are able to access Feature branch workflow, besides experiencing distributed development, pull requests, high availability of information, superior disk utilization and network performance. In addition, Git also reduces replications and redundancy of data.
Developers generally deploy the Branching technique during the process of code isolation. This technique enables the DevOps experts to copy the source code, thereby creating two versions and develop them separately. DevOps teams choose from a variety of branching techniques as per application requirements via the branching strategy.
Continuous integration is a standard development practice of integrating the code changes into a single software development project in an automated manner. Through regular integration of code, developers can quickly detect and locate errors. The source code version control forms the pivot of the Continuous Integration process.
Continuous Integration benefits businesses in terms of faster development cycles, reduced overhead, better team communication, smarter risk mitigation, stable codes, increased flexibility, and a consistent build process.
Trunk-Based development is defined as a source control branching model in the software development arena. This model allows developers to associate code in a single branch called trunk. This helps the team to leverage documented techniques for long-term development branches. Trunk-Based development acts as a primary catalyst for continuous integration and delivery.
Jenkins is a free and open source automation server responsible for automation of repetitive tasks involved in the software development process, such as continuous integration and the technical aspects of continuous delivery. Jenkins runs in servlet containers such as Apache Tomcat and supports VCS tools. Furthermore, the server is also capable of executing sbt based projects, arbitrary shell scripts as well as Windows batch commands.
Most commonly used plugins in Jenkins include Dashboard View, Git, Performance, Kubernetes, and Monitoring plugins, along with the Amazon ECS Container Service.
Continuous Monitoring is a tested way to identify and evaluate the security implications both for planned as well as unexpected changes in the code and accordingly measures the vulnerable areas. This procedure helps developers attain substantial information on the performance levels and usage behavior of the application.
Developers need to backup the entire JENKINS_HOME directory periodically, thereby safeguarding different configurations, build history, and slave node configurations. They can simply copy this directory and create a backup for their Jenkins setup. Similarly, developers can create a clone or replica of a job by copying a specific job directory or renaming it.
Jenkins can be copied or moved from one server to another in multiple ways. For instance, Developers may easily copy the corresponding job directory and shift a job from one Jenkins setup to another. A different way to do the same is by creating a clone of a job directory by a different name. It should be kept in mind, however, that an existing job should be renamed by renaming a directory.
Yes, DevOps teams are able to build multiple jobs or projects simultaneously by deploying the right Jenkins plugin. Followed by the implementation of the parent job, the remaining jobs are automatically implemented. DevOps experts can also create jobs automatically through a pipeline multibranch plugin.
Continuous Testing is a process of performing automated tests and is considered an integral part of the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC). This process is solely directed at the obtaining of feedback on associated business risks in terms of the software release. The purpose of the continuous testing process is to test early and often to keep a check on the issues from proceeding toward the next SDLC stage.
The Continuous Testing process comes with a bunch of benefits. Besides mitigating business risks, this process improves the quality of code, allows seamless access to test environment via service virtualization, all while maintaining a consistent flow and performance level throughout the same configuration across several tests.
As the name suggests, the Test Automation or Automation Testing process helps automate the testing and other repetitive, error-prone tasks. Using separate testing tools, developers can create test scripts for testing and comparing the expected outcomes with the derived ones.
The automation testing process supports a wider coverage of testing application features, allows parallel execution of tasks, makes way for reuse of test scripts, and ensures consistency and efficiency, all while saving operational costs and time through accurate results every time.
The most commonly used Continuous Testing tools are Katalon Studio, Selenium, Watir, Eggplant and Tosca.
Selenium supports two kinds of testing processes, functional and regression. Functional Testing helps verify every function in the software application against the required functional specifications. On the other hand, Regression Testing facilitates re-execution of tests in order to verify the previous functionalities of the software.
Continuous Delivery includes continuous integration, automated testing, and automated deployment capabilities, where the software is developed, built, tested, and released in a fast-paced environment with minimal human intervention. On the other hand, Continuous Deployment refers to the process wherein the qualified changes in the software code are deployed in an automated fashion for production any without manual effort.
The Continuous Testing in DevOps starts right from the development phase, with the developer constantly testing the functionality of the code through tools like Selenium. Next, GitHub and similar tools record these tests with the software code. The DevOps team uses these test data to re-execute the testing process on the new software build. After the code reaches the pre-production stage, the QA team refers to these tests by making some changes to the test specifications. Further, the operations team reuse them to test for user acceptance and achieve better resolution for issues that are likely to occur after the delivery of the software.
Developers perform the continuous testing process in order to avoid testing the code after the development of the entire code. This process prevents unnecessary delay in the release of software, while keeping an eye on the quality of the same.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is specifically designed to work in a client-server model. This method paves the way for interaction with web resources by transmitting hypertext messages between clients and servers.
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