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DevOps Overview

2022-12-30

0. Intro

Today we’re going to talk about DevOps, the topics we are going to cover are:

1. What is DevOps?

DevOps is the union of people, processes, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users.

As Software Engineers, we are familiar with SDLC (Systems Development Life Cycle ), this is basically a process for planning, creating, testing and deploying an information system.

DevOps can be viewed as a superset of SDLC, it emphasizes the union (or integration) of multiple teams, and multiple processes to achieve the most important business goal – deliver value to end users continuously with quality assurance.

Essential DevOps practices include agile planning, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and monitoring of applications.

DevOps is a broad area, doing it right essentially means a mindset shifting of the entire organization and it requires a lot of cross-functional team collaboration and effective communication. That’s why some people also view it as a critical part of the Organization’s Digital Transformation.

What is DevOps?

Definition of Done

A DevOps Definition of Done is working software collecting telemetry against the intended business goals.

DevOps may HURT at first

Like with any changes, adopting DevOps practice is not an easy journey and things could go wrong in the early stages.

One way to help with the pain is to take baby steps and do some experiments, try to find the practices suitable for your organization and process that can amplify the most significant impact, then try some other practices to cross-train the DevOps muscle and develop synergy.

The more you exercise the new techniques, the easier they’ll become.

It’s not only the tools and processes that are changing, it’s also how people are going to react to these changes, some of them might have an open mind, while others could be on the defensive side that insist “This is not suitable for us”.

Bear in mind that it’s a journey for the organization, so it takes time, effort, communication, persistence and patience to see the result.

2. DevOps Key Metric: Cycle Time

Keep in mind that the business goal is always to continuously deliver value to the end users (and of course, grow/scale the business).

In this regard, cycle time is one of the key metrics to measure continuous delivery because it tells us how long it takes for an idea from being worked on till it has reached the end users.

Once it has reached the end users, we need to keep monitoring and collecting feedback to facilitate new changes and values to be delivered.

How to Measure Cycle Time?

Start with the release pipeline. How long does it take to deploy a change of one line of code or configuration? Ultimately, that is the brake on your velocity.

Q: Speed sacrifices Value?

However, some people might argue that faster delivery might impact the value being delivered, for example:

These are valid points because we definitely won’t feel satisfied by just looking at the low cycle time number while a business disaster is caused by “running too fast and carelessly”.

So how can we do it in the right way? How can we reduce our cycle time while maintaining the right level of quality and confidence?

More Changes, More Risks

If you think about any past deployments, it is obvious that a major release with 10 major changes is more likely to break something than a minor release with 2 bug fixes.

DevOps practices encourage more frequent deployment by:

Essentially, DevOps Engineers observe the current business processes, identify key phases and bottlenecks, build an end-to-end pipeline with integrated tools and automation to increase the delivery frequency without sacrificing the quality.

Sounds too good to be true? Let’s keep exploring!

3. DevOps Process

Planning

Development

Continuous Integration - Build Pipeline

With testing built into your CI pipeline, every committed code change triggers a build, and then the build runs tests to ensure the changes pass all tests, policies, and code compliance standards you established for your application. With this in place, bugs are identified earlier and with greater context to simplify their resolution, your teams can deploy more frequently and confidently, and you minimize manual testing and reworking late in the process.

Continous Delivery - Release Pipeline

When continuous delivery is done well, your software release processes become boring — that is, they are low-risk, consistent, and repeatable. Then you can confidently plan release processes and schedules, automate infrastructure and deployments, and manage your cloud resources more effectively.

Continuous Monitoring

Communication & Collaboration

4. DevOps Engineer Skills

Soft Skills

Note: It’s important for DevOps Engineers to learn how to use these technologies in combination to create DevOps processes.

Azure Common Tools

5. Popular Certificates

AWS

Azure

AZ-104/AZ-204 + AZ-400 = DevOps Engineer Expert

Exam Preparation Resources

6. DevOps In Practice

Shifting security left (DevSecOps)

Successful DevOps need to consider security and build it into end-to-end automation.

Security testing can be integrated into the CI pipeline so code is continually tested.

Example of early-stage security testing:

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

One of the DevOps principles is to release quality code fast.

SRE and DevOps Engineers are both practical roles that implement the DevOps process, if a company has both roles, then DevOps Engineer is more focused on the speed of delivery, and Site Reliability Engineer is more focused on the reliability of the system to keep it stable while allowing for fast changes.

7. Summary

By using automation, shifting security to the left, and making processes repeatable and measurable, a DevOps platform leads to better software and reduces the time between designing new, higher-quality features and rolling them out into production. And that maximizes the overall return on software development.

References