Ultimate Guide to DevOps Stack

How to release software effectively and efficiently? Which methodology should we use? It is a question which we have been facing ever since.

In the traditional methodology, the developers write code and send it to QA engineers for testing and they send it to system administration for deployment. But, somehow if at the deployment phase, the deployed application has failed for some reason, System Administrators check the logs and see what can be done to improve the situation.

If the issue is found in the code of the application, the system administrators send it to the developers who find the issue and come up with a fix. Then, they send it to QA engineers for testing. After testing, it goes back to system administrators, who deploy it to the production server.

As you can see, the issue has to go through as many as three stages before getting resolved. Due to using this methodology, the developers are able to release only one or two software per year. The delay in releasing software leads to conflict among the system administration, developers, and quality analyst engineers as well.

That’s the time when the Agile Methodology came. It is an iterative, incremental, and evolutionary process that is way faster than earlier methodology. There, the developers write code and send it to QA engineers for testing.

But, one crucial part was there as well.

The coded application works perfectly for developers on their desktops. But for QA engineers, this doesn’t work perfectly. The bugs were found which leads to conflict among developers and operators that leads to delay in releasing software.

Then the DevOps Stack methodology was born. This is aimed to unite the efforts of developers, QA engineers, and system administrators for maximum productivity and tighter integration. That makes the actual build cycles much faster, and relevant with the help of DevOps managed services and DevOps consulting services.

This article is a complete guide to DevOps Stack and will help you in understanding the concept and implementation process of DevOps Stack.

Introduction

There are several developers who can take part in deployment. And the system administrators can take part in the development process by writing various scripts. They can look into the code of applications and fix simple issues themselves. QA engineers know how to configure simple things. Another point that is crucial to the DevOps Stack methodology is that despite being simple in execution, routine tasks still take time.

By writing scripts, system administrators can focus on more challenging issues. System admins don’t need to wait for QA engineers to test the fixed piece of code as system admins can do it themselves by running automated tests. This enables all team members to come up with better solutions more quickly.

Developers, QA engineers, and system administrators work on solving problems together as opposed to blaming whoever they dislike the most and saying that the problem is “not on their side”. This results in a massive increase in productivity and speed of delivery.

So, after knowing all that, what are you waiting for?

Let’s see, what DevOps holds in the store for you? How can it help you to build software quickly?

But, before taking a deeper dive, you should know the starting and ending points of this guide.

This guide will take you from the origin of DevOps to its origin, principles, implementation, and services as well.

Let’s take a short tour to know what DevOps Stack is.

What is DevOps Stack?

DevOps, the very term is the combination of the two terms, i.e., Development and Operation. DevOps Stack is all about the integration of the efforts of the developers and the operators. This integration helps to shorten the system development life-cycle and in responding to changing requirements more flexibly as well.

Before delving much deeper, we should know the roots of the story.

How did DevOps come into existence? And why DevOps?

Earlier, when waterfall methods proved to be a failure, the agile methodology was born. At that time, developers were like let’s try it too. It solved a lot of problems, and the development phase became faster. But, still, half of the problem was solved, not the whole problem. That’s the time when DevOps came into existence.

With DevOps Stack, the concept of continuous integration and continuous deployment was born.

The concept of continuous integration is all about adding new functionality with the prevailing code. Whereas, continuous deployment stands for the deployment of the code on all the servers.

That means everything happens continuously in the DevOps from the planning phase to the monitoring phase. This involves the use of lots of tools like Git, Selenium, JIRA, puppet, and others as well.

DevOps methodology follows the increment approach which helps to release software faster into the market and saves lots of time. This approach helps the team to offer a better quality of application development. This approach addresses the infrastructure issues and reduces the defects in the life cycle.

That is what makes DevOps a preferable approach.

Now, you are pretty familiar with DevOps. Let’s talk about its basic principles!

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What are the basic principles of DevOps Stack?

1. Involvement of customers: DevOps team must take action while keeping customer’s requirements in mind. For that, they must constantly invest in products and services.
2. Responsibility: The DevOps team should perform its duty properly. This enhances the level of responsibility and the quality of the products engineered.
3. Continuous Improvement: To improve the products or services offered, DevOps focuses on continuous improvement.
4. Automate Everything: Automation is a vital principle of the DevOps process. This is not only for software development but also for the entire infrastructure landscape.
5. Work as One Team: In the DevOps culture designer, developer, and tester should work integrated.
6. Monitor and Test Everything: The DevOps team needs to have a robust monitoring testing procedure.

Hey! That’s pretty much of it!

How to implement DevOps?

As you are familiar with the basic principles, now, you are ready to learn the implementation part. The implementation part contains some stages.

Let’s see what they are!

1. Source Code Management –

The first phase of using DevOps is source code management. This phase includes the management of changing the documents, computer programs, large websites, and other collections of information.

Suppose developer X has made a commit and that commit is causing some error.

Now, how will we know the developer X has made that commit? At what time did he make that commitment? Where is the code in which editing has happened?

We can find the answers to all of these questions, once we use version control like Git Subversion.

There are two source code management tools:

Centralized version control tools

This tool uses the central server to store all the files and enables team collaboration. It works in a single repository to which the user can directly access a central server. Every developer has a working copy of the working directory.

So, the moment they want to make any change in the source code.

They can go ahead and make a commit in the shared repository and can even update their work.

But the problem is that this tool is not locally available. And we need to connect it to a network for performing any action.

As there, everything is centralized. Suppose the central server gets crashed or corrupted, it will result in losing the entire data of the project

Distributed Version Control System –

This tool doesn’t rely on a central server to store all the versions of the project files. Instead, every contributor has a local copy or clone of the main repository.

That copy contains all the files and metadata present in the repository. They can commit and update the local repository without any interference.

And this tool doesn’t need an internet connection, instead, this tool uses a remote server. There, the developers access the data via a hard drive which eases lost data recovery as well.

2. Continuous Integration –

Continuous integration is all about building your application continuously. This phase includes everything from compiling your code, validating it, code review, unit testing, integration testing, and packaging your application.

The teams can easily detect the problems early as every commit which is made in the repository is built. Suppose any developer made a change in the source code, a continuous integration server can pull that code.

Here, the entire software development takes less time. That’s why the software can be completely developed and delivered at the earliest. In Continuous integration, the developers use SVN, Git, Mercurial, JIRA, CVS to create different forms of the code. They send it to the testing phase.

3. Continuous Delivery –

After the integration phase, comes the delivery phase. There, the developers add new functionality with the existing code. And then, the testing phase takes place to update the new code.

Tools like Jenkins triggers any change made in the code automatically or manually.

The application will be deployed on the test servers to check whether the requirements of the user are met or not and to check bugs as well. Tools like Selenium help in performing automation testing.

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4. Continuous Deployment –

After delivery, the code will be deployed on all the servers for release. It is performed in such a manner that any changes made at any time in the code should not affect the functioning of a high-traffic website. We will be using Configuration management and containerization tools.

Where Configuration Management is the act of releasing deployments, scheduling updates on all servers. Configuration management tools help to execute tasks quickly. Some popular tools that are used here are Puppet, Chef, Saltstack, and Ansible.

On the other hand, Containerization tools help to maintain consistency. Docker and vagrant are the popular tools used for this purpose. It makes your application easy to run on different platforms.

Well Done! You have completed most of it

5. Continuous Monitoring –

Continuous Monitoring is the last stage of DevOps.

Once the application is live, the monitoring phase comes. In this phase, the operation team will take care of the inappropriate system behavior or bugs that are found in production and determine the quality of the entire DevOps lifecycle.

These improve the efficiency and dependency of the system resulting in a lower support rate. It is done by using tools like Nagios, Splunk, which provide relevant feedback to the concerned team.

These tools help us monitor the application’s performance and the servers. And these tools also enable us to check the health of the system proactively. They can also improve productivity and increase the reliability of the systems, which in turn reduces IT support costs.

What are the services that DevOps offers?

DevOps Managed Services

What is DMS all about?

DevOps Managed services is a method to access the data and constraint resolution for the companies that need real-time data. These services help companies to understand their situation. It helps to generate a path to continuously improve their process by resolving ongoing situations.

And the goal of the managed services buyers is to resolve and automate a repeatable process.

It helps to improve the operations with automated deployment and data and helps organizations identify vulnerable process areas to remedy and improve the functionality of the suspect code and provide feedback for continuous improvement.

These services include:

• AWS Managed Services – is all about the set of services and tools that automates infrastructure tasks. The main purpose behind this is to migrate on-premises workloads to the public clouds and then manage those workloads after migration for the large enterprises.
• Azure Managed Services – is all about integrated cloud services that developers and IT professionals use to build, deploy, and manage applications through a global network of data centres.
• Google Cloud Managed Services – is all about integrated with IAM and audit logging and managing resources by project, folder, and organization based on the hierarchy.

DevOps Consulting Services

What is DCS all about?

DevOps Consulting Services are the services that help technology-driven enterprises to improve the software delivery process. It also helps their DevOps transformation to increase the speed of delivery, improve the quality, cut the cost, and fewer operational failures by introducing the automating development.

The organizations that don’t know much about DevOps hire the DevOps consultants who are responsible for explaining the values, culture, principles, and practices, showcasing methods, and helping others learn about the DevOps tools.

DevOps consultants have to guide and provide a clear vision to the enterprise.

Conclusion

We hope that you found our blog helpful. After going through the above guide to DevOps, you would be able to utilize the DevOps Stack-based technical solutions for the betterment and impeccable growth of your business with our useful advice and guides.