A BEGINNER’S

HANDBOOK TO DEVOPS
Table of Contents
ABSTRACT........................................................................................................................................
................
4
WHAT IS DEVOPS
............................................................................................................................................ 5
HISTORY OF DEVOPS
..................................................................................................................................... 6
TIMELINE OF DEVOPS
.................................................................................................................................... 8
LIFECYCLE OF DEVOPS
................................................................................................................................. 9
BENEFITS OF DEVOPS
................................................................................................................................. 11 INDUSTRY
PRACTICES USING AZURE DEVOPS ....................................................................................... 12
WHAT IS DEVSECOPS?
................................................................................................................................ 14
PRESENT-DAY UTILIZATION PROS AND CONS
......................................................................................... 15
FUTURE SCOPE OF
DEVOPS....................................................................................................................... 17
CONCLUSION
................................................................................................................................................. 18
 ABSTRACT

Application development in a fast-paced world of technology relies heavily on people, processes, and
technology to deliver reliable software quickly. Initially heavily dependent upon the waterfall model, a top-
down approach encompassing gathering requirements, design, implementation, verification, and maintenance
simplified the development lifecycle but had some areas for improvement, including a lack of visibility of the
project and difficulty catering to changing requirements, among others. As an improvement, the agile
methodology split the waterfall model into different sprints, performed multiple iterations, released phases of
an application with critical features, and introduced advanced features with new releases to achieve desired
outcomes. DevOps, however, gained popularity as IT operations and software development teams grappled
with the time it took to deliver an application using traditional models. DevOps metamorphosed agile
application development by enabling a single unit to perform continuous development, integration, testing,
deployment, and monitoring.

This paper will explore the history of software development models and the coming to existence of DevOps. It
would also dive into the different processes associated with each phase of the DevOps lifecycle and explore
DevSecOps on a high level. The whitepaper is intended for readers looking to gain insight into application
development processes and fully appreciate how DevOps changed the world.
 WHAT IS DEVOPS

Software development in the age of the Internet has transformed the world across all industry segments, from
IT to banking, marketing, and entertainment. Companies drive their annual and long-term targets with sales
statistics and continued interaction with their customer base via software, applications, and devices. In
addition to using customer input to drive strategy, they leverage tools to increase operational efficiencies to
drive their logistics and supply chain. Businesses realized, albeit quickly, that they needed to build and update
their software just as soon as they delivered products via industrial automation to become a market leader in
their respective segments.

DevOps, essentially an abbreviation of two words- development and operations, is a methodology to manage
and monitor the complete lifecycle of application development and deployment by enabling a single team.
DevOps involves continuous integration, deployment, monitoring, communication, and collaboration to
automate and accelerate processes. Software developers and operations personnel collaborate to eliminate
silos in the software development lifecycle to work on and release new features, updates, and fixes in
synchronization with business objectives. The end goal of DevOps is to deliver software of superior quality
and reliability in the shortest period.
 HISTORY OF DEVOPS

To understand why DevOps came into existence, let us look at the success story of Netflix. This media
platform functions and rolls out new movies daily, requiring constant updates. As a modern customer, it is
hard to imagine a world where Netflix only deploys once a month or every few months. This was the
unfortunate reality for developers back in the day.

So, what exactly is the waterfall model? It was one of the earliest known methodologies used in the field of
software development, which usually includes a 7-step process, i.e., Requirement, Design, Implementation,
Verification, and Maintenance. So, let’s relate this to the Netflix example, where the software would have
first been developed and thoroughly tested for months before its market release. The Quality Assurance (QA)
team would have had to take guesses to test every possible scenario and return defects. In contrast,
developers would have had to hustle on bug-fixing and sending them faster to QA so that they could run
them through tests. Due to the number of people involved and the complexity, teams often had to ask the
management to postpone the software's release date.

1
The stakeholders who are involved would present an entirely different approach. It would often push the
team to the edge, leaving them no choice but to roll back everything or release a pre-mature version of the
software, followed by support releases for restarts, hotfixes, etc., to reduce the impact of the damage.

However, this is only a temporary solution because the team can stabilize the software only until the next
release. This ended up being a cyclic process of releasing inefficient software.

Following the failures and complexities set by the waterfall model, a newer methodology was introduced
called the Agile approach, an iterative approach to project management and development that helps teams
develop software at a faster, more efficient way, with lesser rollbacks. This methodology delivers work in
small but regular increments. The different phases are analyzed continuously, hence the developers have a
natural mechanism to change their approach quickly. However, the agile methodology was not the best in
the market and came with its own shortcomings. Since the project was divided into multiple phases, it led
to resource planning constraints and documentation fallacies, which resulted in fragmented output without a
finite end, making it difficult to measure.

A newer methodology called DevOps was formally termed and created in 2009 by Patrick Debois. Debois
is now regarded as one of the pioneering figures of DevOps and has gained significance over the years as
one of its gurus, with more and more organizations integrating DevOps into their operating systems.

The evolution of DevOps occurred because of the combination of the words, ‘development’ and
‘operations,’ which provides a fundamental point for comprehending what exactly people mean when they
refer to “DevOps.” The DevOps methodology is not a technology, process, or an established definitive.

DevOps is often referred to as a cultural viewpoint - the true meaning of DevOps has widened to become
an umbrella term referring to the culture, processes, and mindset used for optimizing and shortening the
life cycle of software development with the help of fast feedback loops for offering features, updates, and
fixes at a frequent pace.
TIMELINE OF DEVOPS

2008-2009
• Understands the drawbacks • The idealogy becomes
on the Waterfall Model. popular amongst starups,
• Identifies that Development • Meeting with Shaper, Gartner predicts good
and Operations required future.
understanding • DevOps incorporated into
large amount of time in Agile
comparison to rest Infrastructure SAFe SAFe is rapidly
• Working on bridging gap gaining traction in the
enterprise arena, where
between Dev and Ops, DevOps is adopted and
terminolgy used first
2007
scaled across
time.

2010-2015

• DevOps is the new norm for

2018 • Enterprises embed more IT
high-performing companies functions in their teams next to
“Clearly, what was state of- • State of DevOps report ‘Dev’ and ‘Ops’ “organizations
the-art three years ago is just defines 5- stage approach are embedding security
not good enough for today’s From level 0 to 5, a (DevSecOps), privacy, policy,
business environment.” descriptive, pragmatic data (DataOps) and controls
approach is introduced to into their DevOps culture and
processes.”
guide teams and mature
DevOps initiatives, a report
sponsored by Deloitte
2016 2019- present
 LIFECYCLE OF DEVOPS

Now that we understand the history of software development and why we needed a more efficient
development methodology, let us know the DevOps Lifecycle.

Plan: In DevOps, planning plays a vital function; all the requirements of the project, which include the
challenges like time taken for every stage, price, and many other parameters, are discussed, and this can help
everyone working on the project teams get an idea of the project.

MONITO TES
R T
PLA RELEAS
N E

CODE
DEPLOY
BUILD
OPERATE
Code: In this stage, the code is written in line with the client's requirements. The code is split into smaller
fragments called Units, which help get a clear picture of the code. For example, on a medical billing system,
the login code can be considered as one unit, and billing categories can be regarded as another unit.

Tools- JIRA, Git

Build: The units (small codes) are built at this stage.

Tools- Gradel, Maven

Test: The team performs tests across all the units to ensure no bugs. If found, it will be returned.

Tools- Pytest, Selenium

Integrate: In this stage, all the units of the codes are integrated, which helps build a connection between the
development team and operation team to put into effect Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment
(CICD).
Deploy: The code would be deployed on the client’s environment.

Tools- AWS, Docker

Operate: Any operations on the code are performed in this phase.

Tool- Kubernetes

Monitor: As the application is mounted on the client’s environment, the application behavior and the client
environment are monitored across different operations making sure of the best application performance.

Tool- Maven

TOOLS USED IN THE DEVOPS LIFECYCLE: A BRIEF REVIEW

Git is an open-source distributed version management software designed to handle many small to substantial
projects with pace and performance. Git has the functionality, overall performance, protection, and versatility
that most teams and coders need.

Gradle is an automation tool known for its flexibility in building software and automating the creation of
applications. The building process includes compiling, linking, and packaging the code.

Selenium gives a single interface that allows one to write test scripts in programming languages like Ruby,
Java, NodeJS, PHP, Perl, Python, and C#, among others to test them.

Jenkins is a tool that helps the user continuously integrate and continuously deliver projects on any platform.
It is an open-source application of DevOps.

Containerization is a type of virtualization in which all the components of an application are bundled into a
single container image and can be run in isolated user space on the same shared operating system. Containers
are lightweight, portable, and highly conducive to automation.2

 Docker is a platform that packages an application and all its dependencies together in containers.
Containerization ensures that the application works in any environment. Containers can have a
multitude of applications installed and pushed to the QA team, after which the QA team runs the
container to replicate the developer's environment.
  Kubernetes is an open-source system that handles scheduling containers onto a compute cluster and
manages the workloads to ensure they run as the user intends. It works brilliantly with all the cloud
providers to become a multi-container management solution.

Maven is an open-source build tool developed to build, publish, and deploy several projects en masse for
better project management. The tool helps developers to develop and document the entire lifecycle
framework.3

BENEFITS OF DEVOPS
SPEED
By leveraging DevOps, organizations can move their development
lifecycle by innovating quickly, adjusting to shifting market needs,
and increasing effectiveness, generating significant business results.

SWIFT DELIVERY
Speeding up releases would ensure that products can be delivered to
the end-users quicker to gain a competitive edge over other players.
 RELIABILITY
As continuous integration and continuous development are two
pillars of DevOps, deployment of application updates and changes
in infrastructure can be enforced reliably and efficiently while
providing end-users with a consistent experience. Monitoring
practices offer real-time insight into performance.

IMPROVED COLLABORATION
The development and operations teams work together at every step,
promoting shared responsibility and accountability and combining
all workflows. This would ensure that inefficiencies that arise are
reduced considerably while saving time.

SECURITY
Bringing forth automation and integration of security testing
solutions, such as organization-wide compliance policies and
configuration management techniques, can help track compliance
violations at any scale.

SCALABILITY
Automation and consistency can help mitigate complex issues with
reduced risk spanning across development, production, and testing
phases repetitively and efficiently.

INDUSTRY PRACTICES USING AZURE DEVOPS

Cloud computing is gradually becoming the primary staple source for every business. It provides the required
security and safeguards unnecessary expenses, overheads, etc. Designing and developing cloud applications is
an excellent advantage to any organization.

One such entrant is Microsoft, with its Azure platform. Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform that assists in this
endeavor by constantly expanding its potential. Developers can scale according to the user's requirements.
Azure is compatible with all major operating systems, programming languages, frameworks, and tools,
making it an enticing platform to work with.
 4
Some of the tools offered by Microsoft Azure that overlay the DevOps environment are as follows.

 Azure Ping: This is a development tool designed to bring effective productivity. This is a utility
extension that runs as a local Windows Service. Azure Ping helps in keeping tabs on Azure Storage
resources.

 Cloud Explorer for VS: This tool helps in the identification of Microsoft Azure resources directly from
Visual Studio IDE (Integrated Development Environment).
 Azure Blob Studio: This tool helps in managing Azure blob storage by creating containers, retrieving
URLs and managing blobs, which is beneficial to developers.
 Azure Grid: The Azure Grid framework helps with more accessible code definition, grid establishment
and allocation of data for each node. This translates to better control through a WPF client application.
 Docker: Docker is one of the crucial tools for Microsoft Azure developers. It is presently the
recommended option for creating, managing, and deploying application containers. Docker is a wholly
supported tool with Microsoft Azure.

 Microsoft Azure Storage Connected Services: Microsoft Azure Storage Connected Service is a new tool
from Microsoft that helps access design-time tools. The design-time tools can help configure Azure
storage services and generate code for the consumption of services.
DEVSECOPS

Another feature within DevOps is to prioritize security while developing software. Despite efforts by
companies, security breaches still occur. Since 2000, over 3.5 billion people have seen their personal data
being compromised. Part of the problem is that as application code scales and its complexity increases, so
does the surface area for security vulnerabilities.
Organizations have been adopting a DevOps approach to automate the integration and deployment of
processes across different teams, because of which traditional security tools often no longer suffice.
Developers need to introduce security into each step of the DevOps workflow; hence the process is often
referred to as DevSecOps.
5

WHAT IS DEVSECOPS?
DevSecOps integrates security into continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment.
By involving DevOps values in software security, security verification becomes an integral part of the
development process.

Like DevOps, DevSecOps integrates IT tools and automates project management workflows. DevSecOps
integrates operational security audits and testing into DevOps workflows so that the product has security built
into each step rather than applied to a finished product.
Implementing DevSecOps involves-
 Introducing security throughout the software development lifecycle to reduce the surface area of
vulnerabilities.
 Security best practices are included in the DevOps team, including Developers and Operation
Teams.
 Automated security checks are performed at each stage of the software delivery through various
means, which span tools, processes, and security controls in the DevOps workflow.
 Every stage with automated security checks by integrating security controls and tools into the DevOps
lifecycle.

PRESENT-DAY UTILIZATION PROS AND CONS

Like every other field in the world of IT, DevOps has its share of pros and cons. Some of the known
advantages and disadvantages of DevOps have been explored below.

ADVANTAGES OF DEVOPS

 Faster product release and time to market: DevOps is often sold as cloud-based services associated with
easy-use tools. This provides separate operations; hence a developer would have to focus on only one tool
without understanding the entire toolchain. This improves better turnaround and collaboration.
 Higher productivity and process efficiency: The process is simplified with the indulgence of limited focus
areas for the developers and operations. Hence the existing process has better productivity and efficiency,
thereby even reducing the production cycle.
 Engaged and motivated staff results in better Customer experience management as the team has a fixed
and focused task that is set in hand. This engagement also gives the team a clear product vision.
 Finally, with a practical and motivated workforce working with high efficiency, we can expect increased
deployment success rates, product quality, and flexibility in support releases. This also reduces the
chances of product failures.
 The cyclic approach works as a constant feedback system that helps the team always remain focused on
self-improvement, making it a win-win scenario.
DRAWBACKS OF DEVOPS

 Cloud Complexity and Compatibility: Since the production environment is in the cloud, the infrastructure
test process is complex. One would require an in-depth understanding of integration and orchestration
workflows. The DevOps methodology focuses mainly on speed over security.
 Demands proper mindset across the company on knowing what is required and the limitations. Since speed
is prioritized over security, one tends to lower business security by outsourcing DevOps operations. This is
altogether another issue when dealing with continuous integration and continuous delivery. Organizations
must aim at being fault-tolerant and alleviate human error. Automation of testing processes could be
enforced and require a highly skilled engineering team to accomplish the goal.
 Dealing with the legacy systems in the production environment, i.e., getting the right pool of expertise to
implement DevOps, is challenging. In addition to the costs for new hardware and software, organizations
must recruit specifically skilled engineers, developers, and operations personnel, increasing the complexity
of implementing the model and potentially risking downtime.
 Organizations must be ready to face the organizational and technical changes required during the
transition. This includes transitioning to new DevOps tools and moving away from today's tools.
 FUTURE SCOPE OF DEVOPS
The future scope of DevOps is heavily reliant on maximizing the outcomes while mitigating and staying
vigilant of the disadvantages, which can be considered insights for improvement.

DevOps, undoubtedly, has brought about a palpable culture shift worldwide. The world has undergone a
digital transformation, and companies are pressured to innovate faster for their teams and customers and to
stand apart from their competitors. Some of the applications of DevOps in various industry segments have
been explored:

IT Industry: Organizations like Amazon (through AWS), HP, Netflix, Adobe, and Atlassian, among others,
have already adopted DevOps models in their operations. The IT Industry streamlines operations and enables
developers to release features much faster without impacting their customers.

Banking: The banking and finance sector often relies on DevOps for their IT infrastructure as it complies
with regulations like the PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) and manages the
confidential information of its end-users. In addition, they can use DevOps by getting streamlined feedback
loops and frequent software releases of their banking applications, enhancing the user experience.

Healthcare: As healthcare catalogs sensitive patient information and complies with several federal laws,
DevOps toolchains can manage data through efficient data pipelines and large data applications. This is
relevant to medical device testing reports, lab reports for patients, electronic health records, wearables,
insurance claims, etc., and leverages them for audit purposes.

Inventory management: DevOps is an enterprise-wide set of rules that can be enforced in a wide range of
businesses, including sales and marketing, customer service, quality assurance, IT operations management,
project management, quality assurance, and human resources to streamline all activities in a much-reduced
time frame.
 CONCLUSION
In a world where developers are desperate to keep up with the need for faster, more frequent updates in an
ever-changing industry, constant updates are not customer-facing alone. Businesses demand faster, better
products to help them be more competitive in their respective industries.

DevOps is one of the new approaches to software development that is gaining precedence in the industry.
DevOps has significantly impacted building a concrete structure behind designing any cloud-based application
and is widely used across all sectors. The recent advancements in this field have spread over a large area like a
forest fire leading to vast research openings unseen before.

The above article has covered all points and aspects one should know before choosing DevOps. The unwritten
truth is that DevOps has a bright future. With more companies readily accepting this methodology as its
standard and with constant evolution of new tools and technologies, DevOps is undoubtedly the go-to
technology path.

The authors of this article sincerely hope that the article and the topics discussed will answer all your
questions and give you an end-to-end overview of DevOps.