I.

DevOps Introduction

1. What is DevOps?
I know that's the first answer everybody would be looking for and I will not try to define it.
Because so many people have done it already before me and guess what there are many different
definitions for it. Everybody in the IT industry is talking about it. Organization are running post to
pillars to hire DevOps Engineers and there is a great demand for it.

Some say its automation but some say it’s all about culture, both this belief contradicts with each
other.

Well if its automation then system admins are doing automation from ages and there they used
Scripting languages and some tool to achieve it but we did not call it DevOps back then, we just
said automation. So, then you would say it’s the culture but if it’s just the culture then why so many
automation tools? You would be feeling now that I am confusing you but trust me I am going to
prove some points later, just keep reading.

If you are reading this you would somehow related to software industry. Yes, software industry, its
only goal is to make software's and deliver it to the user. We can say from the very beginning
software industry is divided into two parts and those two parts are Development and Operations.
Development focuses on creating and testing software's.
Operations is focussed on delivering those software's to user in form of a website or as an
installable software. Once delivered we maintain the software, we deliver new features to our users
and make sure the software's stay up and running and healthy.

2. Job Roles & their Motto.

In Development, we have distinct roles like Developers, Software testers(QA), DB Developers &
Architects. Their aim is to develop all the latest and greatest features in the software's, Rapidly or
quickly.
In Operations, we have roles like System Admins, Cloud Engineers, DB admins & Security
professionals. Here the aim is to keep the systems up and running all the time. Systems on which
the software is hosted, like your websites and databases hosted on some servers.

You would have understood by now that both the parties have different aims and goals. One
focusses on Quick Change and other focusses on Stability. These are poles apart, if we make quick
changes (adding new features continuously) then stability becomes an issue. A system that’s
changes continuously will have issues with stability. It’s also true the other way around.

Visualpath Training & Consulting.

Flat no: 205, Nilgiri Block,Aditya Enclave, Ameerpet, Hyderabad, Phone No: - +91-970 445 5959, 961 824 5689 E-
Mail ID : [email protected], Website : www.visualpath.in.
We are living in a world where there are frequent changes to our software’s and apps. Think about
it if you are using a software with some old features and some other software comes into the market
with the latest & greatest feature you will ofcourse migrate to the new software. So that means if an
organizations Dev and Ops team does not give you latest and greatest feature with stability they
may lose the business.

So far, I have established few points that I will list below.

• Developers aim to create latest features quickly and rapidly.

• Operations aim is to keep systems stable.
• Quick changes are the user demand.
• User also needs stable software or Apps.

DevOps whole and sole objective is to Deliver latest and greatest features to the user with stability.
It’s no more about just creating new features it’s also about delivering those features to the user
otherwise what’s the point of creating if we cannot deliver it on time.

So how does DevOps solve that problem? To understand it first we need to understand the
development procedure and then we will focus on the operations.

3. Software Development Processes

Development process is explained in detail in later chapters here we will try to keep it to the
minimum.

Development team uses some Software development model to create the software. In layman terms,
these software development models are set of rules that everybody in the team follows to get the
things done.

Waterfall Model
There is Waterfall model which is a traditional model and does not fit well in today’s fast-moving
world.

In Waterfall model, the following phases are followed in order:

1.System and software requirements: captured in a product requirements document

2.Analysis: resulting in models, schema, and business rules
3.Design: resulting in the software architecture
4.Coding: the development, proving, and integration of software
5.Testing: the systematic discovery and debugging of defects
6.Operations: the installation, migration, support, and maintenance of complete systems

Visualpath Training & Consulting.

Flat no: 205, Nilgiri Block,Aditya Enclave, Ameerpet, Hyderabad, Phone No: - +91-970 445 5959, 961 824 5689 E-
Mail ID : [email protected], Website : www.visualpath.in.
Thus, the waterfall model maintains that one should move to a phase only when its preceding phase
is reviewed and verified.
This model is good for the Operations team as they get the whole software developed at once which
they can deploy and maintain. New changes will also be less frequent and does not put so much
burden on the Operations team.
But this model does not scale well with the current fast-moving world. There are so many downfalls
with this model and most of the Development is happening with Agile model now.
Agile Model
Agile model developed software in small iterations instead of developing entire software at once.
Entire products feature list is divided into multiple list of features. For example, if there are 50
features in a software we can create 5 lists of 10 features each. Now developers will work on 10
features at a time, create and deliver those 10 features in first iteration and continue with the rest of
the features until you get the final product.
Every iteration involves cross functional teams working simultaneously on various areas like −
• Planning
• Requirements Analysis
• Design
• Coding
• Unit Testing and
• Acceptance Testing.

Visualpath Training & Consulting.

Flat no: 205, Nilgiri Block,Aditya Enclave, Ameerpet, Hyderabad, Phone No: - +91-970 445 5959, 961 824 5689 E-
Mail ID : [email protected], Website : www.visualpath.in.
Now we are not just talking about creating but also delivering it to different environments like Dev,
QA, Staging, UAT and Prod. Now this puts lot of burden on the Operations team as they must
continuously deliver these changes on multiple environments. By the way these different
environments are just some group of servers owned by different teams like QA is owned by
software testers where they test the software.

The general approach that Developers take is that once they are done creating a new feature they
will send a procedural document to the operations team explaining how to deploy it.

Developers test it on their machine and feels that it should work same in production also. But
production systems are different in design as there would be multiple servers for webservice,
database service and backend services secured by firewalls and NACL. There would be all stable
OS and software with a different version that of Developers systems. Development servers are
simple one machine and all the services are generally deployed in one server.

Visualpath Training & Consulting.

Flat no: 205, Nilgiri Block,Aditya Enclave, Ameerpet, Hyderabad, Phone No: - +91-970 445 5959, 961 824 5689 E-
Mail ID : [email protected], Website : www.visualpath.in.
 4. The Problem
After following the procedural document and having their own skills and knowledge operations will
deploy it to production. This is where the problem comes in, the deployment may fail, failing the
entire service. This happened because of lack of communication between Dev and Ops team. Dev
does not understand Ops part and the reverse is also true.

So, Ops feel that frequent changes like that may break the system and Dev feels that there is too
much restriction on delivering latest changes. We also need to think about security here. Security
testing is done before it goes to production. This entire Delivery procedure is slow and manual most
of the time.

Think about quick changes now through agile model, it’s not helping the operations team to deliver
the code faster. So, no matter how agile development is Operations is still Waterfall.

Visualpath Training & Consulting.

Flat no: 205, Nilgiri Block,Aditya Enclave, Ameerpet, Hyderabad, Phone No: - +91-970 445 5959, 961 824 5689 E-
Mail ID : [email protected], Website : www.visualpath.in.
If you think about it for a while you will understand that it’s not the technological problem but the
culture problem. Both the parts in Software Industry follow different culture. If this culture is not
changed then we will not be able to deliver better feature quickly to the users.
A Very famous joke describes the communication problem.

5. Enter the DevOps

DevOps solves this problem by changing the culture and making it one culture Dev+Ops.
There would be one team, DevOps, with one goal, Rapid delivery with stability.
But how?
First step is to establish communication and collaboration between Dev and Ops. Dev must
understand the Ops part and Ops must understand the Development Procedure.

Visualpath Training & Consulting.

Flat no: 205, Nilgiri Block,Aditya Enclave, Ameerpet, Hyderabad, Phone No: - +91-970 445 5959, 961 824 5689 E-
Mail ID : [email protected], Website : www.visualpath.in.
DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire
service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support.
We have seen previously in waterfall and agile lifecycle, that Development and Operations team are
separate, they work separately in their own silos and have very different motto.

6. DevOps LifeCycle
DevOps Lifecycle includes Development and Operations teams working together. As Developers
work on their agile iterations, Ops must work in setting up systems and automating the procedure of
deployment. Automation is the key factor here, because agile model gives code repeatedly to deploy
it on systems, that’s going to be continuous release of code and that must be continuously deployed
to many servers in Dev, QA, Staging & Production environments.

If the code deployment process is not automated then ops team must manually do the deployment.
Deployment may include below mentioned procedures.

• Create servers if they don’t exist (On cloud or virtual env).

• Install and setup prerequisites or dependencies on servers.

• Build the software from raw source code (If not done by Developers).

• Deploy software to servers.

• Do config changes to OS and software.

• Setup Monitoring.

• Feedback & Report.

Note: All the above process may be less or more depending on the kind of deployment. We will
discuss this in later chapters.

Visualpath Training & Consulting.

Flat no: 205, Nilgiri Block,Aditya Enclave, Ameerpet, Hyderabad, Phone No: - +91-970 445 5959, 961 824 5689 E-
Mail ID : [email protected], Website : www.visualpath.in.
As soon as we get a new code change, it must be deployed to Production or at least staging
servers.
For this, all the process must be automated, we must automate first Build and Release process
which includes.

• Developers push the code in a centralised place.

• Fetch the developers code.

• Validate code.

• Build & test code

• Package it into distributable format(software/artifacts).

• Release it.
Next phase is to deploy this released software to servers, which we discussed already before this.
Combining this Build & Release with Deployment process gives us the DevOps Lifecycle which is
fully automated.

DevOps Engineers must automate all the above process it should be so seamless that when
developers push their code to a central repository it should be fetched and run through all the above
process and sends it to production systems.
As I say, “From Code to Prod”.

Visualpath Training & Consulting.

Flat no: 205, Nilgiri Block,Aditya Enclave, Ameerpet, Hyderabad, Phone No: - +91-970 445 5959, 961 824 5689 E-
Mail ID : [email protected], Website : www.visualpath.in.
What is continuous Integration.
Developers will push their code several times in a day to a central repository, every time there is
code change it should be pulled, built, tested and notified. There will be continuous code change so
continuously we must do these steps. That’s why its Continuous integration. We have a separate
chapter for this where it will be discussed in detail. As of now you can understand from above
diagram that from step 1 to step 5 is CI.

What is Continuous Delivery?

After CI, we should be also able to deliver our code changes to all the servers in different
environments like Dev, QA, Staging. It should be automatically delivered to QA servers where
testers will do functional tests, load tests etc. After it passes the QA tests it should automatically
deliver the code to staging area where customer or some set of users can check the changes and give
approval to deploy it to Production.
As per Wikipedia.
Continuous delivery and DevOps are similar in their meanings and are often conflated, but they are
two different concepts. DevOps has a broader scope, and centres around the cultural change,
specifically the collaboration of the various teams involved in software delivery (developers,
operations, quality assurance, management, etc.), as well as automating the processes in software
delivery. Continuous delivery, on the other hand, is an approach to automate the delivery aspect,
and focuses on bringing together different processes and executing them more quickly and more
frequently. Thus, DevOps can be a product of continuous delivery, and CD flows directly into
DevOps.

Visualpath Training & Consulting.

Flat no: 205, Nilgiri Block,Aditya Enclave, Ameerpet, Hyderabad, Phone No: - +91-970 445 5959, 961 824 5689 E-
Mail ID : [email protected], Website : www.visualpath.in.
What is Continuous Deployment?
If the approval is manual process then code delivery is Continuous Delivery but if the approval
process becomes automated then after staging, the code change is done directly to Production
systems. This is called as Continuous Deployment.

7. DevOps and Software Development Life Cycle

The DevOps Lifecycle Looks Like This:
1. Check in code
2. Pull code changes for build
3. Run tests (continuous integration server to generate builds & arrange releases): Test
individual models, run integration tests, and run user acceptance tests.
4. Store artefacts and build repository (repository for storing artefacts, results & releases)
5. Deploy and release (release automation product to deploy apps)
6. Configure environment
7. Update databases
8. Update apps
9. Push to users – who receive tested app updates frequently and without interruption

Visualpath Training & Consulting.

Flat no: 205, Nilgiri Block,Aditya Enclave, Ameerpet, Hyderabad, Phone No: - +91-970 445 5959, 961 824 5689 E-
Mail ID : [email protected], Website : www.visualpath.in.
 10. Application & Network Performance Monitoring (preventive safeguard)
11. Rinse and repeat

The above process is also called a Code Delivery Pipeline.

8. Tools for DevOps Lifecycle

We have discussed earlier that everything starts from communication and collaboration between
Dev and Ops. Once we understand the culture and process of the project/product we can start
working with everyone in designing Code Delivery Pipeline. We must decide what automation tools
to use to create entire pipeline. We need to decide where our infrastructure would be hosted? On the
cloud, virtual machines or physical machines?
In today’s world we have lot of automation tools, but first we need to understand their categories
what tools is used for what purpose? If we don’t understand that then we won’t be able to decide
where to use them in our code delivery pipeline.

Version Control Systems: Is used to store the source code, a central place to keep all the code and
tracks its version.
For Example:

• Git

• SVN

• Mercurial

• TFS
Build tools: Build process is where we take the raw source code, test it and build it into a software.
This process is automated by build tools.
For Example

• Maven

• ANT

• MSBuild

• Gradle

• NANT

Continuous Integration Tools:

Visualpath Training & Consulting.

Flat no: 205, Nilgiri Block,Aditya Enclave, Ameerpet, Hyderabad, Phone No: - +91-970 445 5959, 961 824 5689 E-
Mail ID : [email protected], Website : www.visualpath.in.
For example:

• Jenkins

• Circle CI

• Hudson

• Bamboo

• Teamcity
Configuration Management tools: Also known as automation tools, can be used to automate
system related tasks like software installation, service setup, file push/pull etc. Also used to
automate cloud and virtual infrastructure.
For example:

• Ansible

• Chef

• Puppet

• Saltstack
Cloud computing: Well this is not any tool but a service accessed by users through internet. A
service that provides us with compute resource to create virtual servers, virtual storage, networks
etc. There are few providers in the market who gives us public cloud computing services.
For example:

• AWS

• Azure

• Google Cloud

• Rackspace
Monitoring tools: Is used to monitor our infrastructure and application health. It sends us
notifications and reports through email or other means.
For example:

• Nagios

• Sensu

• Icinga

• Zenoss

• Monit

Visualpath Training & Consulting.

Flat no: 205, Nilgiri Block,Aditya Enclave, Ameerpet, Hyderabad, Phone No: - +91-970 445 5959, 961 824 5689 E-
Mail ID : [email protected], Website : www.visualpath.in.
Containers & Microservices: Well to be very frank this cannot be described to you right now. Its
described in detail in separate chapter. We need to have lot of Infra & Development knowledge to
understand this category of tool.

• Docker

• RKT

• Kubernetes

9. DevOps Lifecycle with images of devops tools.

Visualpath Training & Consulting.

Flat no: 205, Nilgiri Block,Aditya Enclave, Ameerpet, Hyderabad, Phone No: - +91-970 445 5959, 961 824 5689 E-
Mail ID : [email protected], Website : www.visualpath.in.
Summary:
✓ DevOps cannot be defined in one sentence. DevOps is the culture and also the
implementation of automation tools. It depends from which area you are defining it.
✓ Majority of the Software development is happening with Agile model and that churns out
code changes incrementally and frequently.
✓ Operations does not gel well with the Agile team as both have differences in their principles.
✓ Agile team wants quick change, Ops wants to keep system stable by not making frequent
changes.
✓ DevOps helps in creating communication, collaboration and integration between Dev and
Ops and culture, practices and tools level.
✓ DevOps Engineer must understand DevOps lifecycle and implement right tool of
automation at right place.

Learning automation at every level in the lifecycle is highly important if you want to make a carrier
in DevOps domain. You should understand Infrastructure, Development & Automation.
Later in the book we will dig more in detail into tools and learn them. We will also understand CI &
CD from tools point of view.

Visualpath Training & Consulting.

Flat no: 205, Nilgiri Block,Aditya Enclave, Ameerpet, Hyderabad, Phone No: - +91-970 445 5959, 961 824 5689 E-
Mail ID : [email protected], Website : www.visualpath.in.