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    DevOps with Windows Server 2016: Click here to enter text.
    DevOps with Windows Server 2016: Click here to enter text.
    DevOps with Windows Server 2016: Click here to enter text.
    Ebook1,004 pages5 hours

    DevOps with Windows Server 2016: Click here to enter text.

    By Ritesh Modi

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Delivering applications swiftly is one of the major challenges faced in fast-paced business environments. Windows Server 2016 DevOps is the solution to these challenges as it helps organizations to respond faster in order to handle the competitive pressures by replacing error-prone manual tasks using automation.
    This book is a practical description and implementation of DevOps principles and practices using the features provided by Windows Server 2016 and VSTS vNext. It jumps straight into explaining the relevant tools and technologies needed to implement DevOps principles and practices. It implements all major DevOps practices and principles and takes readers through it from envisioning a project up to operations and further. It uses the latest and upcoming concepts and technologies from Microsoft and open source such as Docker, Windows Container, Nano Server, DSC, Pester, and VSTS vNext.
    By the end of this book, you will be well aware of the DevOps principles and practices and will have implemented all these principles practically for a sample application using the latest technologies on the Microsoft platform. You will be ready to start implementing DevOps within your project/engagement.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPackt Publishing
    Release dateMar 24, 2017
    ISBN9781786463340
    DevOps with Windows Server 2016: Click here to enter text.

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      DevOps with Windows Server 2016 - Ritesh Modi

      (missing alt)

      Table of Contents

      DevOps with Windows Server 2016

      Credits

      About the Author

      Acknowledgments

      About the Reviewer

      Acknowledgments

      www.PacktPub.com

      Why subscribe?

      Customer Feedback

      Preface

      What this book covers

      What you need for this book

      Who this book is for

      Conventions

      Reader feedback

      Customer support

      Downloading the example code

      Downloading the color images of this book

      Errata

      Piracy

      Questions

      1. Introducing DevOps

      Software delivery challenges

      Resistance to change

      Rigid processes

      Isolated teams

      Monolithic design and deployments

      Manual execution

      Lack of innovation

      What is DevOps?

      DevOps principles

      Collaboration and communication

      Flexible to change

      Application lifecycle management

      Development methodology

      Software design

      Automating processes and tools

      Failing fast and early

      Innovation and continuous learning

      DevOps practices

      Configuration management

      Continuous integration

      Build automation

      Test automation

      Application packaging

      Continuous deployment

      Preproduction deployment

      Test automation

      Staging environment deployment

      Acceptance tests

      Deployment to production

      Continuous delivery

      Continuous learning

      Measuring DevOps

      Summary

      2. DevOps Tools and Technologies

      Cloud technology

      Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

      Platform as a Service (PaaS)

      Software as a Service (SaaS)

      Advantages of using cloud computing

      Windows Server 2016

      Application platform

      Windows Server as a hosting platform

      Nano servers

      Windows Containers and Docker

      Hyper-V containers

      Nested virtual machines

      Enabling microservices

      Reduced maintenance

      Configuration management tools

      Deployment and packaging

      Visual Studio Team Services

      Source code management service

      Team Foundation Version Control

      Exploring Git

      Build Management service

      Executing Build Definitions

      Build architecture

      Agents, agent pools, and agent queues

      Queuing Build Definitions

      Configuring a Build definition

      Release Management service

      Executing release definitions

      Release Management architecture

      Release definition configuration

      Setting up a cloud environment

      Visual Studio Team Services

      Azure account

      Summary

      3. DevOps Automation Primer

      Azure Resource Manager

      ARM and ASM

      ARM advantages

      ARM concepts

      Resource providers

      Resource types

      Resource groups

      Resource and resource instances

      Azure Resource Manager

      Azure Resource Manager architecture

      Azure Resource Manager features

      Role-Based Access Control

      Tags

      Policies

      Locks

      Multi-region

      Idempotent

      Extensible

      Azure Resource Manager templates

      Template basics

      Parameters

      Variables

      Resources

      Outputs

      Expressions and functions

      Nested resources

      A minimal template

      ARM template tools

      Authoring tools

      Deployment tools

      Deployments

      PowerShell

      PowerShell features

      Cmdlets

      Pipeline

      Variables

      Scripts and modules

      Azure PowerShell development environment

      Pester

      Installing Pester

      Writing tests with Pester

      Pester real-time example

      Desired State Configuration

      DSC Push architecture

      DSC Pull architecture

      Pull configuration example

      DscLocalConfigurationManager() attribute

      ConfigurationRepositoryWeb

      Partial Configurations

      Pushing LCM Configuration

      Summary

      4. Nano, Containers, and Docker Primer

      Virtualization

      Containers

      Docker

      Container host

      Container images

      Docker Hub/Docker Registry

      Installing a Windows Server 2016 Container on Azure

      Provisioning Azure virtual machines

      Installing Windows Nano Server on Azure

      Provisioning Nano Server

      Using Docker client

      Container life cycle management

      Docker run

      Docker ps

      Docker start

      Docker stop

      Docker rm

      Docker restart

      Docker pause

      Docker unpause

      Image management

      Docker build

      Docker commit

      Docker images

      Docker rmi

      Docker tag

      Monitoring commands

      Docker logs

      Docker stats

      Docker inspect

      Docker events

      Docker registry management

      Docker login

      Docker push

      Docker pull

      Understanding Dockerfile

      Docker build command

      Shell and Exec instruction forms

      Shell form

      Exec form

      Dockerfile instructions

      COMMENT

      FROM

      MAINTAINER

      COPY

      ADD

      WORKDIR

      EXPOSE

      ENV

      VOLUME

      RUN

      CMD

      ENTRYPOINT

      Summary

      5. Building a Sample Application

      Experiencing the application

      Application architecture

      Preparing development environment

      Installing SQL Server Management Studio

      Creating Azure SQL Server and SQL database

      Creating database tables

      Understanding database schema

      Setting up Visual Studio solution

      Modify web.config connection string

      Publish profile for web application

      Parameters.xml

      Running the sample application

      Understanding Visual Studio Solution

      Entity Framework

      Controllers and Views

      Controllers

      Views

      Configuration management

      Unit testing

      Unit testing DrugController

      Mocking Drug data access class

      Drug controller unit tests

      Summary

      6. Source Code Control

      Configuration Management

      Source Configuration Management

      Centralized

      Distributed

      Visual Studio Team Services

      Git 101

      Git init

      Git clone

      Git add

      Git commit

      Git branch

      Git merge

      Git remote

      Installing Git for Windows on the development environment

      Adding Online Pharmacy to the VSTS Git repository using Visual Studio 2015

      Managing a Git Repository using VSTS

      Submitting code changes to a Git repository

      Pulling code changes from a Git repository

      Onboarding another developer for the same application

      Cloning and adding a solution to the VSTS Git repository

      Adding a project to the VSTS Git repository using the command-line tool

      Cloning and adding a solution to VSTS Git repository using the Git command-line tool

      Summary

      7. Configuration Management

      Infrastructure as Code

      Objectives of Infrastructure as Code

      Revisiting sample application architecture

      Azure Key Vault

      Operational Insights

      Desired State Configuration Pull Server

      Azure storage account

      Azure virtual machines and containers

      Azure public load balancer

      Azure SQL

      Security considerations

      Storing secrets and credentials

      Secure login to Azure subscription

      Storage account keys and shared access signature tokens

      Network Security Groups and firewalls

      The IT administrator and deployment role

      Steps for deployment for an IT administrator

      PreCreate.ps1

      GeneralServices.json

      Parameters

      Variables

      Resources

      Microsoft.OperationalInsights/workspaces

      Microsoft.KeyVault/vaults

      Microsoft.KeyVault/vaults secrets

      Outputs

      Steps for deployment of the operator or release pipeline

      UploadScriptFiles.ps1

      Test-ARMTemplate.ps1

      New-TemplateDeployment.ps1

      OnlineMedicine.parameters.json

      OnlineMedicine.json

      Parameters

      Variables

      Resources

      Microsoft.Compute/availabilitySets

      Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts

      Microsoft.Network/virtualNetworks

      Microsoft.Network/networkSecurityGroups

      Microsoft.Network/publicIPAddresses

      Microsoft.Network/networkInterfaces

      Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines

      Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/extensions - CustomScriptExtension

      Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/extensions - MicrosoftMonitoringAgent

      Microsoft.Network/publicIPAddresses - for load balancer

      Microsoft.Network/loadBalancers

      Microsoft.Network/publicIPAddresses - web application public IP addresses

      Microsoft.Network/networkInterfaces - web application NICs

      Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines - web application virtual machines

      Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/extensions - CustomScriptExtension

      Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/extensions - MicrosoftMonitoringAgent

      Microsoft.Sql/servers, databases, firewallRules

      Outputs

      Summary

      8. Configuration Management and Operational Validation

      Steps for deployment through the release pipeline

      PullServer.ps1

      IISInstall.ps1

      ContainerConfig.ps1

      dockerfile

      lcm.ps1

      ChangeConnectionString.ps1

      PreparePesterEnvironment.ps1

      Execute-Pester.ps1

      Environment unit tests

      Unit testing availability set

      Unit testing virtual networks

      Unit testing Network Security Groups

      Unit testing load balancer

      Unit testing Azure SQL

      Unit testing Azure SQL Firewall

      Unit testing the count of virtual machines

      Unit testing virtual machine 01

      Unit testing virtual machine 02

      Unit testing the DSC Pull Server virtual machine

      Unit testing the DSC Pull Server operating system

      Unit testing the web application operating system

      Environment operational validation

      The operational validation folder structure

      The operational validation of the web application on the first virtual machine

      The operational validation of the web application on the second virtual machine

      The operational validation of the web application using an Azure load balancer

      Unit and operational validation tests

      Summary

      9. Continuous Integration

      Continuous integration

      Why continuous integration?

      Fail fast and often

      High confidence and cadence

      Better collaboration

      Reduction of technical debt

      Principles of Continuous Integration

      Automation

      Single repository

      Fast execution

      Reporting

      Security

      Continuous integration process

      Types of continuous integration

      Scheduled builds

      Continuous build

      Gated builds

      Integration with source code configuration management

      Integration with work item management

      Build definition

      Defining variables

      Build activities

      NuGet installer activity

      Visual Studio Build activity for the OnlinePharmacy project

      Visual Studio Build activity for the OnlinePharmacy test project

      The Visual Studio Test activity for OnlinePharmacy project binaries

      Replace Tokens activity for updating the web application's name

      Archive Files activity for deployment.zip

      Copy and Publish Build Artifacts activity

      Build options

      Repository

      Triggers

      General, retention, and history

      Build pipeline execution

      Summary

      10. Continuous Delivery and Deployment

      Understanding releases

      Release management

      Continuous delivery

      Continuous deployment

      Why continuous delivery and deployment?

      Detecting deployment issues early

      Eliminating surprises and risks

      Reducing cost of change

      Pushing frequent changes to production

      Removing risky manual deployments

      Moving away from human dependency

      The principles of continuous deployment

      Automation as an enabler

      Infrastructure as Code

      Shortened execution time

      Reporting

      Secure deployments

      Continuous deployment process

      Continuous delivery process

      Alternate strategies

      Using Azure automation for DSC Pull Server

      Using Docker hub/Docker registry

      Using Docker compose

      Using Docker management tools such as Swarm or Kubernetes

      Types of releases

      Scheduled releases

      Continuous deployment

      Azure Resource Manager service endpoint

      Release pipeline definition

      Variables configuration

      Artifacts configuration

      Triggers configuration

      General, retention, and history

      Release environments

      Preparation environment

      Azure file copy task

      Azure PowerShell

      Test environment

      Azure PowerShell - test ARM template deployment

      Azure PowerShell - deploy test environment

      PowerShell - prepare Pester environment

      Copy files - copy operational validation module

      Azure PowerShell - execute Pester and operational validation tests

      Production environment

      Azure PowerShell - test ARM template deployment

      Azure PowerShell - deploy test environment

      PowerShell - prepare Pester environment

      Copy Files - copy operational validation module

      Azure PowerShell - execute Pester and operational validation tests

      Release pipeline execution

      Release pipeline strategies

      A/B testing

      Blue/Green deployments

      Canary releases

      Summary

      11. Monitoring and Measuring

      Application Insights

      Provisioning

      Changes to sample application

      Application Insights dashboard

      Operational Insights

      Provisioning

      OMS agents

      Search

      Solutions

      Summary

      DevOps with Windows Server 2016

      DevOps with Windows Server 2016

      Copyright © 2017 Packt Publishing

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

      Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

      Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

      First published: March 2017

      Production reference: 1210317

      Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

      Livery Place

      35 Livery Street

      Birmingham 

      B3 2PB, UK.

      ISBN 978-1-78646-855-0

      www.packtpub.com

      Credits

      About the Author

      Ritesh Modi is currently working as Senior Technology Evangelist at Microsoft, where he ensures that developers, startups, and companies are successful in their endeavors using technology. Prior to that, he was an Architect with Microsoft Services and Accenture. He is passionate about technology and his interest lies in both Microsoft as well as open source technologies. He believes optimal technology should be employed to solve business challenges. He is very active in communities and has spoken at national and international conferences.

      He is a known industry leader and already a published author. He is a technology mentor for T-Hub and IIIT Hyderabad startup incubators. He has more than 20 certifications and is a Microsoft certified trainer. He's an expert on Azure, DevOps, Bots, Cognitive, IOT, PowerShell, SharePoint, SQL Server, and System Center. He has co-authored a book titled Introducing Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview with the Windows Server team. He has spoken at multiple conferences, including TechEd and PowerShell Asia conference, does lots of internal training and is a published author for MSDN magazine. He has more than a decade of experience in building and deploying enterprise solutions for customers. He blogs at https://automationnext.wordpress.com/ and can be followed on Twitter @automationnext. His linked profile is available at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ritesh-modi/.

      Ritesh currently lives in Hyderabad, India.

      Acknowledgments

      Writing this book has been a fantastic experience. I personally have gained as a person who has more patience, perseverance, and tenacity than before. I owe a lot to the people who pushed me through their encouragement and motivation. I would like to thank the Almighty and my parents for their blessings. I would like to thank many people for making this book happen. 

      I must start with the people who mean the world to me, who inspire me to push myself and who ultimately make everything worthwhile. I am talking about my mother Bimla Modi, wife Sangeeta Modi, and daughter Avni Modi, the three wonderful ladies in my life.

      Thanks of course must go to the PacktPub team. I would like to thank my editors Rashmi Suvarna and Juliana Nair for taking this project and helping me through it. I would like to thank the acquisition editor, Kirk D'costa, for finding me for this book. I would also like to thank my technical editor, Aditya Khadye, who walked through the book multiple times and gave incredibly useful feedback.

      Last but not the least, I would like to thank my team at Microsoft, Manoj Damodaran, Michael Hopmere, and Ravi Mallela with whom I had several discussions to make this book better.

      About the Reviewer

      Satya works as a DevOps consultant at Microsoft. He enables teams to adopt best DevOps practices across different delivery domains which leads to better agility, reliability, and consistency.

      In the past 18 years, he has gathered diverse experience in product planning, development, testing, and release management areas that helps him define DevOps strategy for various software projects.

      He delivered multiple product releases in engineering domains such as Geographic Information System, Software Delivery, Unified Communications, Modern Engineering, and Application Lifecycle Management while working at Intergraph, Computer Associates, and Microsoft.

      Satya has also contributed to Release Management service, which is an integral part of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS).

      Acknowledgments

      I would like to thank my son, Kaushal, and my daughter, Srikari, for being patient when I spent most of my personal time during technical review. They are awesome. I would like to thank my wife, Swati, for her constant support. It would not be possible without her. I would like to thank my mother, Surya Parvathamma, and my father, Krishna Rao, for their blessings. They are foundation of what I am. I would like to thank the author, Ritesh Modi, for asking me to be a part of this wonderful project. I am sure this book will make the implementation of best DevOps practices real. I would like to thank my manager, Manoj Damodaran, and leadership at Microsoft for allowing me to undertake this.

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      Preface

      With the adoption and popularity of cloud technology, DevOps has become the most happening buzzword in the industry. The concepts of DevOps are not new and have been implemented historically. In recent times, DevOps is getting implemented widespread in enterprise world. Companies that have not yet implemented DevOps have started discussing its potential implementation. In short, DevOps is becoming ubiquitous across both big and small organizations.  Organizations are trying to reach out to their customers more often with quality deliverables. They want to achieve this while reducing the risks involved in releasing to production. DevOps helps in releasing features more frequently, faster, and better, in a risk-free manner. It is a common misconception that DevOps is either about automation or technology. Technology and automation are enablers for DevOps and help better and faster DevOps implementation. DevOps is a mindset and culture, it is about how multiple teams come together for a common cause and collaborate with each other, it is about ensuring customers can derive value from software releases, and it is about bringing consistency, predictability, and confidence to overall application life cycle processes. DevOps also has levels of maturity. The highest level of DevOps is achieved when multiple releases can be made in an automated fashion with high quality through continuous integration, continuous delivery, and deployment. It is not necessary that every company should achieve this level of DevOps maturity. It depends on the nature of the company and its projects. While fully automated deployment is a need for some companies, it could be overkill for others. DevOps is a journey and companies typically start from a basic level of maturity by implementing a few of its practices. Eventually, these companies achieve high maturity as and when they keep improving and implementing more and more DevOps practices. DevOps is not complete without appropriate infrastructure for monitoring and measuring health of both environment and application. DevOps forms a closed loop, with operations providing feedback to development teams about things that work well in production and things that do not work well.

      In this book, we will explore the main motivation for using DevOps and discuss in detail the implementation of its important practices. Configuration management, source code control, continuous integration, continuous delivery and deployment, monitoring and measuring concepts and implementation will be discussed in depth with the help of a sample application. We will walk through the entire process from scratch. On this journey, we will also explore all the relevant technologies used to achieve the end goal of DevOps.

      This book has relevant theory around DevOps, but is heavy on actual implementation using tools and technologies available today. There are many ways to implement DevOps and this book talks about approaches using hands-on technology implementation. There is little or no material that talks about end-to-end DevOps implementations, and this book tries to fill this gap.

      I have approached this book by keeping architects, developers and operations teams in mind. I have played these roles, understand the problems they go through, and tried to solve their challenges through practical DevOps implementation.

      DevOps is an evolving paradigm and there will be advancements and changes in future. Readers will find this book relevant even in those times.

      What this book covers

      Chapter 1, Introducing DevOps, introduces the motivation for implementing the DevOps paradigm in any software development endeavor. The chapter focuses on practices and principals at a high level, creating the context for other chapters in the book.

      Chapter 2, DevOps Tools and Technologies, walks through the major technology components important from a DevOps implementation perspective. It discusses cloud technologies, build and release management services, Git, Windows Server 2016, Docker containers, and Nano servers. This chapter provides a brief introduction to each of these technologies.

      Chapter 3, DevOps Automation Primer, walks through major automation technologies, enabling faster and better DevOps implementation. This chapter provides a brief introduction to PowerShell, Azure Resource Manager templates, Pester, and Desired State Configuration.

      Chapter 4, Nano, Containers, and Docker Primer, focuses on new Windows Server 2016 features such as Nano servers, containers, and Docker. It provides an introduction to these technologies with examples. The chapter shows how to provision Nano servers using Azure PowerShell, containers using Azure Resource Manager template, and working with Docker and dockerfiles.

      Chapter 5, Building a Sample Application,  introduces a sample application that helps in showing and implementing DevOps practices. It is an ASP.NET MVC web application consisting of a frontend and a database. The chapter also discusses important technical components that are integral to the sample application.

      Chapter 6, Source Code Control, discusses the importance of using a version control system and provides multiple ways to interact and work with Visual Studio Team Services using Git. It shows ways to check-in the sample application into Git, and multiple ways to interact and work with VSTS Git repositories using Visual Studio. It also provides a small primer into working with Git using commands.

      Chapter 7, Configuration Management, introduces one of the most important DevOps practices and its implementation. It discusses the concept of Infrastructure as Code and its importance. This chapter focuses on infrastructure and application configuration management. It provides descriptions of the code, scripts, and configuration used for the sample application. The sample application will be deployed using these configuration management artifacts.

      Chapter 8, Configuration Management and Operational Validation, continues where the last chapter ended. It shows implementation of Infrastructure as Code, along with unit testing and the operational validation of environments.

      Chapter 9, Continuous Integration, discusses another important DevOps practice and provides details about its importance, principles, benefits, and implementation. Visual Studio Build pipelines are discussed extensively while providing details about a sample build pipeline built for the sample application.

      Chapter 10, Continuous Delivery and Deployment, discusses two of the most important DevOps practices and provides details about their importance, principles, benefits, and implementation. Visual Studio Release pipelines are discussed extensively while providing details about a sample release pipeline consisting of multiple environments built for the sample application.

      Chapter 11, Monitoring and Measuring, discusses at length the concepts and implementation related to monitoring and measuring the different aspects of applications and environments in the production environment for the sample application.

      What you need for this book

      This book assumes a basic level knowledge on Windows operating system, cloud computing and application development using a web programming language, and moderate experience with the application development life cycle. The book will go through deployment of a sample application on Azure within Windows Containers using a set of virtual machine. This requires a basic understanding of cloud storage, computing, networking, and virtualization concepts on Azure. The book implements DevOps practices using Visual Studio Team Services and basic knowledge of this is expected, although this book tries to cover its foundations. If you have experience with Azure and Visual Studio Team Services, this is a big plus.

      A valid Azure subscription and Visual Studio Team Services subscription is needed to get started with this book. They are both available free of cost on a trial basis.

      As all deployments are made to the cloud, you will require a development environment on a local computer, consisting of:

      CPU: 4 cores

      Memory: 8 GB RAM

      Disk space: 250 GB

      This should be enough for the development environment.

      In this book, you will need the following software:

      Azure subscription

      Visual Studio Team Services subscription

      Windows 10 OS build 14393 version 1607 or Windows Server 2016 build 14393

      SQL Server Management Studio version 12 or 13

      Git for Windows 64-bit 2.12.0

      Visual Studio community 2015 SP 3 version 14.0

      Docker 1.12.2-cs2-ws-beta

      Internet connectivity is required to work with chapters in this book.

      Who this book is for

      The primary audience of this book are developers, IT professionals, enterprise architects, and software and solution architects who are shaping, implementing and designing strategies for their customers. DevOps engineers, IT operations professionals and students interested in learning and implementing DevOps  will find this book extremely useful.

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      Chapter 1.  Introducing DevOps

      Change is the only constant in life is something I have been hearing since I was a child. I never understood the saying; school remained the same, the curriculum was the same for years, home was the same, and friends were the same. However, once I joined my first software company, it immediately struck me that yes, Change is the only constant! Change is inevitable for any product or service, and this is amplified many times over when related to a software product, system, or service.

      Software development is a complex undertaking comprising multiple processes and tools, and involves people from different departments. They all need to come together and work in a cohesive manner. With so much variability, the risks are high when delivering to the end customer. One small omission or misconfiguration and the application might come crashing down. This book is about adopting and implementing practices that reduce this risk considerably and ensure that high-quality software can be delivered to the customer again and again. This chapter is about explaining how DevOps brings people, processes, culture, and technology together to deliver software services to the customer effectively and efficiently. It is focused on the theory and concepts of DevOps. The remaining chapters will focus on realizing these concepts through practical examples using Microsoft Windows 2016 and Visual Studio Team Services.

      This chapter will answer the following questions:

      What is DevOps?

      Why is DevOps needed?

      What problems are resolved by DevOps?

      What are its constituents, principles, and practices?

      Before we get into the details of DevOps itself, let's understand some of the problems software companies face that are addressed by DevOps.

      Software delivery challenges

      There are inherent challenges when engaged in the activity of software delivery. It involves multiple people with different skills using different tools and technologies with multiple different processes. It is not easy to bring all these together in a cohesive manner. Some of these challenges are mentioned in this section. Later, in subsequent chapters, we will see how these challenges are addressed with the adoption of DevOps principles and practices.

      Resistance to change

      Organizations work within the realms of economic, political, and social backdrops, and they have to constantly adapt themselves to a continuously changing environment. Economic changes might introduce an increase in competition in terms of price, quality of products and services, changing marketing strategies, and mergers and acquisitions. The political environment introduces changes in legislation, which has an impact on the rules and regulation for enterprise. The tax system and international trade policies are also examples of areas in which change can have an impact. Society decides which products and services are acceptable or preferred and which are discarded. Customers demand change on a constant basis. Their needs and requirements change often and this manifests in the systems they are using. Organizations not adept at handling changes in their delivery processes and who resist making changes to their products and features eventually find themselves outdated and irrelevant. These organizations are not responsive to change. In short, the environment is ever changing and organizations perish if they do not change along with it.

      Rigid processes

      Software organizations with a traditional mindset release their products and services on a yearly or multi-year basis. Their software development life cycle is long and their operations do not have many changes to deploy and maintain. Customers demand more but they wait till the next release from the company. The organization is either not interested or does not have the capability to release changes faster. Meanwhile, if the competitor is able to provide more and better features faster, customers will soon shift their loyalty and start using them. The first organization will start losing customers, have reduced revenues, and fade away.

      Isolated teams

      Generally, there are multiple teams behind any system or service provided to the customer. Typically, there is a development team and an operations team. The development team is responsible for developing and testing the system, while the operations team is responsible for managing and maintaining the system on production. The operations team provides post-deployment services to the customer. These two teams have different skills, experience, mindset, and working culture. The charter of the development team is to develop newer features and upgrade existing ones. They constantly produce code and want to see it in production. However, the operations team is not comfortable with frequent changes. The stability of the existing environment is more important to them. There is a constant conflict between these two teams.

      There is little or no collaboration and communication between these two teams. The development team often provides code artifacts to the operations team for deployment on production without helping them to understand the change. The operations team is not comfortable deploying the new changes since they are neither aware of the kind of changes coming in as part of a new release nor have confidence deploying the software. There is no proper hand-off between the development and operations teams. Often, the deployments fail on production and the operations team has to spend sleepless nights ensuring that the current deployment is either fixed or rolled back to a previous working release. Both the development and operations teams are working in silos. The development team does not treat the operations team as equivalent to itself. The operations team has no role to play in the software development life cycle, while the development team has no role to play in operations.

      Monolithic design and deployments

      Development goes on for multiple months before testing begins. The flow is linear and the approach is Waterfall, where the next stage in software development life cycle happens only when the prior stage is completed or nearing completion. Deployment is one giant exercise in deploying multiple artifacts on multiple servers based on documented procedures. Such practices have many inherent problems. There are a lot of features and configuration steps for large applications and everything needs to be done, in order, on multiple servers. Deploying a huge application is risky and fails when a small step is missed during deployment. It generally takes weeks to deploy a system such as this in production.

      Manual execution

      Software development enterprises often do not employ proper automation in their application lifecycle management. Developers tend to check-in code only after a week, the testing is manual, configuration of the environment and system is manual, and documentation is either missing or very dense, comprising hundreds of pages. The operations team follows the provided documentation to deploy the system manually on production. Often this results in a lot of downtime on production because smaller steps have been missed in deployment. Eventually, customers become dissatisfied with the services provided by the company. Also, this introduces human dependencies within the organization. If a person leaves the organization, their knowledge leaves with them and a new person has to struggle significantly to gain the same level of expertise and knowledge.

      Lack of innovation

      Organizations starts losing out to competition when they are not flexible to meet customer expectation with newer and upgraded products and services. The result is falling revenues and profits, eventually making them nonexistent in the marketplace. Organizations that do not innovate newer products and services consistently nor update them cannot provide exponential customer satisfaction.

      What is DevOps?

      Today, there is no consensus in industry regarding the definition of DevOps. Every organization has formulated their own definition of DevOps and has tried to implement it accordingly. They have their own perspective and tend to think they have implemented DevOps if they have automation in place, configuration management is enabled, they are using agile processes, or any combination thereof.

      DevOps is about the delivery mechanism of software systems. It is about bringing people together, making them collaborate and communicate, working together toward a common goal and vision. It is about taking joint responsibility, accountability, and ownership. It is about implementing processes that foster a collective and service mindset. It enables a delivery mechanism that brings agility and flexibility within the organization. Contrary to popular belief, DevOps is not about tools, technology, and automation .Automation acts as an enabler to implement agile processes, induce collaboration within teams and help in delivering faster and better. 

      There are multiple definitions of DevOps available on the Internet and they do not provide complete definition. DevOps does not provide a framework or methodology. It is a set of principles and practices that, when employed within an organization, engagement, or project, achieve the goal and vision of both DevOps and the organization. These principles and practices do not mandate any specific process, tools and technologies, or environment. DevOps provides guidance which can be implemented through any tool, technology, and process, although some of the technology and processes might be more appropriate

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