DevOps: An Ultimate Beginners Guide 2020

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of applications that blend software development and information technology operations which mainly focus to reduce the system development life cycle and to yield consecutive delivery of high-quality software. The concept of DevOps is founded to emphasize collaboration, integration, and communication between the IT operations and the software developer’s teams to quickly meet business goals and challenges.

Why Devops is important in Software Development Process?

Digitalization is sweeping across many firms, creating an exceptional demand for companies to experiment with tech trends, innovate and on-time delivery capabilities faster. Enterprises need to adopt a more flexible, reliable and efficient approach to increase speed and agile to stay with a competitive market.

DevOps is a new approach that is gaining rapid popularity as it allows enterprises to evolve and improve its products at a faster pace than the traditional software development and framework management systems. There are many reasons to choose DevOps in S/W development process.

Faster transformation with shorter development cycles: Devops model enables both development and operations teams to work closely and innovate applications much more quickly with fewer development cycles. This makes companies stay successful in the competitive business market and helps customers to faster and better adoption with changing markets.

Lower deployment failures and faster recovery time: The shorter development cycles with DevOps make constant code releases which in turn easier to find out the code defects. The number of deployment failures can be reduced using agile programming principles. As the development and operation teams are working together, the faster recovery time to fix the bugs can be easily achieved.

Increased Efficiencies: Continuous integration and speedy delivery practices make to automate the process from building to the deployment of software release. The scalable infrastructure, parallel workflows and build application tools provide more efficient and faster product delivery at a rapid pace to the end-user or customer.

Better collaboration and communication: Devops creates an improved software development culture by combining both development and operations teams for more productivity. This new IT culture focuses on performance with a common goal instead of individual goals. Both teams collaborate and communicate to innovative more effective and faster release of the product on-time to the market.

Devops Lifecycle:

DevOps provides deep integration between both teams of IT development and operations. It includes principles of continuous development and deployment, code automation, inter-team collaboration, testing, monitoring, configuration management, and agile IT service. A better understanding of Devops can be achieved by knowing about the DevOps lifecycle. Here is a short summary of each stage of continuous DevOps life-cycle:

1. Development:  In this DevOps first stage, software development constantly takes place. In this phase, the whole development process is separated into short development cycles. The shorter development lifecycles benefit the DevOps team to speed up the software development process and product delivery on time.

2. Testing: In this phase, the QA team uses manual and automation tools like Selenium to identify and fix defects in every piece of developed code.

3. Integration: In this integration stage, new features functionality is integrated with the current code, and testing takes place. The continuous development process can be possible only due to continuous integration and testing processes.

4. Deployment: In this stage, the deployment process takes place continuously. Deployment can be done in a proper way so that further if any changes made in code, it won’t affect the functionality of the developed product or service.

5. Monitoring: In this monitoring phase, the operation team will handle the improper system behavior or bugs that are found in the final production stage.

DevOps Automation Tools:

The Devops automation tools help in achieving speed and agility of the product or service by automating all the testing processes. In large Devops team it is difficult to maintain huge IT infrastructure, so to avoid complexity the automation framework is divided into six different categories. Let us see a few useful tools in each category and how they help in resolving the problems in each stage of development and operation processes.

1. Infrastructure Automation:

• Amazon Web Services: As AWS is a cloud-based service, there is no requirement of physical representation of the data center. And it also helps in an easy way to scale on-demand things. It can be automatically configured to provide more servers depending upon traffic. It is a cloud service; hence there will be no in-front hardware costs.

2. Configuration Management:

• Chef: It is a very useful DevOps tool to achieve scale, speed, and consistency. It mainly used to ease out complex tasks and configuration management. With the help of this tool, the DevOps team makes changes in one place instead of making changes in all thousands of servers because this tool helps to reflect on other servers automatically.

3. Deployment Automation:

• Jenkins: This tool mainly helps to provide continuous integration and testing processes. It integrates the project changes very quickly and easily as fast as built deployment takes place.

4. Log Management:

• Splunk: This tool helps to solve the problems in areas of aggregating, storing and it analyzes all logs in one place.

5. Performance Management:

• App Dynamic: This tool offers real-time performance monitoring. It collects the data, further the data helps developers to debug when bugs arise.

6. Monitoring:

• Nagios: It is a very important tool because it monitors systems, networks, and infrastructure. This tool offers to monitor and alerting services for switches, servers, services, and applications. Finally, it mainly helps in finding bugs and resolving the issues.

“ There are many different DevOps tools depending upon functionality and requirements. Hence, DevOps makes an easier way by bringing a new flow across the software development lifecycle.”

Why Should You Learn Devops?

DevOps has huge demand in the software industry to create quality code and faster product releases. DevOps is a buzzing keyword that benefits both enterprises and employees because of its wide variety of features. Let us see some key points regarding - Why learn Devops?

1. Anyone can Learn DevOps: Basic knowledge of Linux fundamentals and shell scripting language and text-editor will be an added advantage to learn the DevOps course easily. People from different backgrounds can also learn DevOps easily. Freshers who want to enter into the software field may choose and learn DevOps easily to build a strong career path.

2. Increasing Demand: More and more business enterprises are realizing the importance of DevOps relative to their competitiveness and success. Pursuing a career in the DevOps is more tempting as the demand is steadily rising each year around the world. As the jobs with Devops are expected to grow exponentially each year, the career with DevOps is the right choice to start your career.

3. More Job Opportunities: DevOps is a trending concept in the industry and many more companies are deploying DevOps practices. As the DevOps framework blend management, development, and operation concepts, hence there are better job opportunities in this field. Different job roles with DevOps are:

4. Easy to Get a Job: The supply of dedicated engineers is still low as the requirement is huge in the IT job market. As of today, 18,097 Devops engineer jobs are available in the US - indeed. And job opportunities with it are exponentially increasing each year. With the rapid increase in demand for devops, the career with DevOps is the right choice to start your career. Freshers can easily find a suitable career path with DevOps because there are many different job opportunities are available in the software development and IT operations field.

5. Higher Salaries: Devops professional getting a high salary compared to other domain engineer positions. And also there are many opportunities through Devops. The average salaries of Devops engineer and its related job roles in the US and India are given below - from Glassdoor.

The average salary for a Devops engineer in the US is $99,604/ year – Glassdoor

Average base Pay for a Devops engineer in India is 609K per year - Glassdoor

6. Faster Career Growth: In general, Devops professionals have unique knowledge which gives an edge over to fast career growth. With increasing your work performance and experience will surely lead to agile career growth: Devops Freshers/ Junior engineer will be promoted to senior Devops engineer; further senior DevOps engineer can be promoted to a Project manager or release manager, automation architect or even a DevOps Evangelist.

Conclusion: