The World Of DevOps

Let’s summarize our previous blog All about DevOps. In our previous blog, we covered,

•      Scope of DevOps Engineer

•     What is DevOps

•    Salary of DevOps Engineer

•      What do DevOps Engineers do

•      Skills required to become a DevOps Engineer

•      Responsibilities of DevOps Engineer

•      DevOps Roadmap

•      Most demanding DevOps Skills

If you haven’t read my previous blog, I highly recommend you go through the previous one before proceeding here.

In this blog, we will be discussing How is DevOps Important.

There are several reasons why DevOps is becoming increasingly important in the software development world.

DevOps help to speed up the software development process, updates, and releases.

The speed at which new software features and updates need to be released is increasing all the time. Customers expect to be able to access the latest features and updates as soon as they are available, and they are not willing to wait weeks or months for them. This has led to a need for shorter development cycles, which in turn has put pressure on development and operations teams to work more closely together.

DevOps helps to handle complex applications.

The complexity of software applications is increasing. With the rise of microservices (such as Kubernetes and Docker), it is becoming more difficult to deploy and manage software applications. DevOps can help in some of these processes, making it easier to manage complex applications.

DevOps helps companies make better use of data.

The amount of data that needs to be processed and stored is increasing exponentially. This is particularly true for companies in the Internet of Things (IoT) space, who are dealing with large volumes of data from sensors and devices. DevOps can help to automate the process of data collection, analysis, and storage so that companies can make better use of this data.

DevOps has shorter Development Cycles, Faster Innovation.

            When we have a biased response from the development and operations teams, it is often difficult to tell if the application is operational. When development teams simply submit a request, the cycle times are unnecessarily extended.

With joint development and operations efforts, the team's applications are ready to use more quickly. This is important because companies succeed on the basis of their ability to innovate faster than their competitors.

Better Communication and Cooperation

            The common teams are happier and more productive. Culture focuses on performance rather than individual goals. When teams trust each other, they can experiment and innovate more effectively. Teams can focus on bringing the product to market or production, and their key performance indicators must be organized accordingly.

It no longer involves "passing" the application to the processes and waiting to see what is happening. Processes do not need to wait for a different team to solve a problem.

DevOps reduce Implementation Failure, Reflections, and Recovery Time

            The main reason for the failure of the teams in the implementation failure is due to programming defects. With shorter development cycles, DevOps promotes frequent code versions. This, in turn, makes it easy to detect code defects. Therefore, teams can use their time to reduce the number of implementation failures using agile programming principles that require collaboration and standard programming. Recovery time is an important issue because you should expect some failure. But recovery is much faster when development teams and operations work together to share ideas and take into account the challenges of both teams during development.

DevOps Engineer vs Software Engineer

            The roles of a DevOps engineer and a software engineer are often confused. A DevOps engineer is not the same as a software engineer, although the two roles do have some overlap.

A DevOps engineer helps overcome the siloed working between development and operations teams. They work closely with both teams to help automate the process of software delivery.

A DevOps engineer also helps to manage and deploy complex software applications.

A software engineer, on the other hand, is responsible for developing and maintaining software applications. They may also be involved in the design and implementation of DevOps tools and processes, but their primary focus is on the software itself.

A Clear understanding on the difference between Software Engineer and DevOps Engineer

Topic	Software Engineer	DevOps Engineer
Actual Work	A software engineer is an IT person who designs, develops, maintains, tests, and evaluates computer software/software products using the principles of software engineering.	DevOps engineer is an IT person who is a part of both development and operation means DevOps engineers work on code with the developer team, oversee the code releases, and also manage the deployment and operation processes.
Knowledge Required	A software engineer requires knowledge of data structure and algorithms, good in programming skills, debugging large codebases, troubleshooting software issues, strong reasoning, and analytical skills, principles, etc.	A DevOps engineer requires knowledge of programming, management, Knowledge of agile and DevOps principles, problem-solving skills, organizational skills, etc.
Works with	Software engineer works separately from the operations side of an organization.	DevOps engineer works with the operation side of an organization.
Roles and Responsibilities	The job roles and responsibilities of a software engineer include Implementing technical designs, Improving and maintaining the existing code base, Reviewing code changes, Writing new codes for applications include, Identifying issues with the software and operating procedures of software, and Coordinating the installation of software for the clients.	The job roles and responsibilities of a DevOps engineer includes Accessing the technological automation tools, Managing the cloud deployment, Leading the software development team, Maintaining compliance and security controls, Monitoring operations, and Working and Improving the development process.
Main Focus	Software engineers focus on specific aspects of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).	DevOps engineers have knowledge of the entire Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
Skills	Software engineers do not have so many managerial and organizational skills.	DevOps engineers have highly managerial and organizational skills.
Experience	Software engineers do not require any prior work experience before stepping into a Software engineer role.	DevOps engineers are required to have some prior experience before stepping into the DevOps engineer role.
Tools and Technologies	Software engineers use the new technology and tools referred to by the DevOps team to make the development process faster.	DevOps engineers foster efficiency at every stage so the development team adopts new technology to create and update software in a short period of time.
Main Focus	So the main focus of software engineers is to develop a good software product to meet the requirement of the client.	While the main focus of DevOps engineers is to deploy and smooth the operation of the software product.
Salary	In general Software engineers get less salary than DevOps engineers with the same experience.	In general DevOps engineer with the same experience gets 25-35% more salary with the same experience.

 

 

How DevOps can help Improve Software Development

DevOps can help to improve software development in a number of ways.

•      Automating the process of software delivery can help to speed up the development cycle so that new features and updates can be released more quickly.

•      Working closely with the operations team can help to identify and fix problems more quickly so that they don’t cause delays in the development cycle.

•      Automating the process of data collection, analysis, and storage can help developers make better use of data, and improve the quality of their software.

•      Helping to manage and deploy complex software applications can free up time for developers to focus on the software itself.

Top Tools Used by DevOps Engineers

1.    Docker

Docker is a high-end DevOps tool that allows building, ship, and run distributed applications on multiple systems. It also helps to assemble the apps quickly from the components, and it is typically suitable for container management.

Features

•      It configures the system more comfortable and faster.

•      It increases productivity.

•      It provides containers that are used to run the application in an isolated environment.

•      It routes the incoming request for published ports on available nodes to an active container. This feature enables the connection even if there is no task running on the node.

•      It allows saving secrets into the swarm itself. 

2.    Chef

A chef is a useful tool for achieving scale, speed, and consistency. The chef is a cloud-based system and open source technology. This technology uses Ruby encoding to develop essential building blocks such as recipes and cookbooks. The chef is used in infrastructure automation and helps in reducing manual and repetitive tasks for infrastructure management.

Chef has got its convention for different building blocks, which are required to manage and automate infrastructure.

Features

•      It maintains high availability.

•      It can manage multiple cloud environments.

•      It uses popular Ruby language to create a domain-specific language.

•      The chef does not make any assumptions about the current status of the node. It uses its mechanism to get the current state of the machine. 

3.    Kubernetes

Kubernetes is open-source orchestration software for deploying, managing, and scaling containers.

Keeping containerized apps up and running can be complex because they often involve many containers deployed across different machines. Kubernetes provides a way to schedule and deploy those containers—plus scale them to your desired state and manage their lifecycles. Use Kubernetes to implement your container-based applications in a portable, scalable, and extensible way.

Features

•      Kubernetes will control for you which server will host the container, how it will be launched etc

•      It is able to manage more clusters at the same time

•      It offers security, networking and storage services

•      It checks constantly the health of nodes and containers

•      It mounts and add storage system of your choice to run apps

•      It always knows where to place containers, by calculating the “best location” for them

•      It is an open source tool and gives you the freedom to take advantage of on-premises, hybrid, or public cloud infrastructure, letting you move workloads to anywhere you want. 

4.    Apache Camel

Apache Camel is an Open Source integration framework that empowers you to quickly and easily integrate various systems consuming or producing data.

Apache Camel is standalone, and can be embedded as a library within Spring Boot, Quarkus, Application Servers, and in the clouds. Camel subprojects focus on making your work easy.

Apache Camel is the industry standard for reducing boilerplate code for complex integrations — while maintaining features like:

•      Automatic error handling

•      Redelivery policies.

•      The ability to handle complex aggregations.

Features

•      Camel offers an extensive library of more than 80 components, and these components allow Camel to connect with transports, data formats, and use APIs.

•      It has a modular architecture that enables the component to load into Camel.

•      Camel supports the POJO model and allows users to plugin Javabeans at several points.

•      It supports pluggable languages to create DSL programs and supports languages such as Python, SQL, XQuery, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, Groovy, XPath, etc.

•      It makes testing of asynchronous and distributed systems using messaging.

•      Camel uses an easy and intuitive URI configuration to configure endpoints directly in routes.

•      It has an in-built type-converter mechanism that transfers more than 150 converters. So, there is no need to configure the type-converter from byte arrays.

•      It provides a Test kit that makes it easy to test the camel applications. The kit contains test-specific components that can help to test the real endpoints.

5.    Jenkins

Jenkins is a DevOps tool for monitoring the execution of repeated tasks. Jenkins is a software that allows continuous integration. Jenkins will be installed on a server where the central build will take place. It helps to integrate project changes more efficiently by finding the issues quickly.

Features

•      Jenkins increases the scale of automation.

•      It can easily set up and configure via a web interface.

•      It can distribute the tasks across multiple machines, thereby increasing concurrency.

•      It supports continuous integration and continuous delivery.

•      It offers 400 plugins to support the building and testing any project virtually.

•      It requires little maintenance and has a built-in GUI tool for easy updates.

6.    GitHub

Git is an open-source distributed version control system that is freely available for everyone. It is designed to handle minor to major projects with speed and efficiency. It is developed to co-ordinate the work among programmers. The version control allows you to track and work together with your team members at the same workspace. It is used as a critical distributed version-control for the DevOps tool.

Features

•      It is a free open source tool.

•      It allows distributed development.

•      It supports the pull request.

•      It enables a faster release cycle.

•      Git is very scalable.

•      It is very secure and completes the tasks very fast.

7.    Puppet

Puppet is the most widely used DevOps tool. It allows the delivery and release of technology changes quickly and frequently. It has features of versioning, automated testing, and continuous delivery. It enables to manage entire infrastructure as code without expanding the size of the team.

Features

•      Real-time context-aware reporting.

•      Model and manage the entire environment.

•      Defined and continually enforce infrastructure.

•      Desired state conflict detection and remediation.

•      It inspects and reports on packages running across the infrastructure.

•      It eliminates manual work for the software delivery process.

•      It helps the developer to deliver great software quickly.

8.    Ansible

Ansible is a leading DevOps tool. Ansible is an open-source IT engine that automates application deployment, cloud provisioning, intra service orchestration, and other IT tools. It makes it easier for DevOps teams to scale automation and speed up productivity.

Ansible is easy to deploy because it does not use any agents or custom security infrastructure on the client-side, and by pushing modules to the clients. These modules are executed locally on the client-side, and the output is pushed back to the Ansible server.

Features

•      It is easy to use to open source deploy applications.

•      It helps in avoiding complexity in the software development process.

•      It eliminates repetitive tasks.

•      It manages complex deployments and speeds up the development process.

9.    Saltstack

Stackify is a lightweight DevOps tool. It shows real-time error queries, logs, and more directly into the workstation. SALTSTACK is an ideal solution for intelligent orchestration for the software-defined data center.

Features

•      It eliminates messy configuration or data changes.

•      It can trace detail of all the types of the web request.

•      It allows us to find and fix the bugs before production.

•      It provides secure access and configures image caches.

•      It secures multi-tenancy with granular role-based access control.

•      Flexible image management with a private registry to store and manage images.

10. Eclipse

Eclipse is defined as a platform for developing computer-based applications using various programming languages like JAVA, Python, C/C++, Ruby, and many more. The Eclipse is IDE (Integrated development kit) and mainly JAVA-based programming is done on this platform.

 

Features

•      For any software the software update system is always the key mechanism. For the eclipse IDE the software update system is very simple as the developer can easily add the plug-ins that help the developer to develop the advanced version of applications.

•      The dependencies are very limited in the eclipse platform as the IDE gives the facility by providing a simple dialog box in which the user selects the software and add-ons that needed to be in the eclipse platform.

•      Enterprise-based java tooling is supported by the Eclipse platform. As there are several tools available in this IDE for creating JEE projects. The user can download the JavaEE bundle that can be used for developing web-based applications.

•      The platform also supports JPA tooling and JSF tooling, web service development, and also supports editing XML files. In the platform, the server view tab is available in which the application can be deployed on any server as per user requirements.

•      The Spring developers also use the same IDE platform as eclipse also supports spring-based applications.

11.  Maven

Maven is a tool that allows for software project management and also assists in understanding and exploring the project by providing an overview and visualization of the project.

Software Project Management is provided via managing the project’s build, providing a standard and simplified way of specifying and managing the resources, files, dependencies in the project and share the project’s output artefacts with other projects/applications.

Visualization of the project is provided via providing the project information, managing the reporting of the project and documentation of the project.

 

Features

•      Simple project setup that follows best practices.

•      Consistent usage across all projects.

•      Dependency management including automatic updating.

•      A large and growing repository of libraries.

•      Extensible, with the ability to easily write plugins in Java or scripting languages.

•      Instant access to new features with little or no extra configuration.

•      Maven is able to build any number of projects into predefined output types such as jar, war, metadata.

•      Maven improved error reporting, and it provides you with a link to the Maven wiki page where you will get full description of the error.

12.  Nagios

Nagios is one of the more useful tools for DevOps. It can determine the errors and rectify them with the help of the network, infrastructure, server, and log monitoring systems.

Features

•      It provides complete monitoring of desktop and server operating systems.

•      The network analyser helps to identify bottlenecks and optimize bandwidth utilization.

•      It helps to monitor components such as services, application, OS, and network protocol.

•      It also provides to complete monitoring of Java Management Extensions. 

13.  Amazon Web service

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud-based platform is use for building solutions for businesses using inter-connected web services. It also provides a variety of pre-built services which can benefit businesses to build their custom cloud-based solutions.

Features

•      The flexibility of AWS allows us to choose which programming models, languages, and operating systems are better suited for their project, so we do not have to learn new skills to adopt new technologies.

•      AWS provides no upfront investment, long-term commitment, or minimum spend.

•      You can scale up or scale down as the demand for resources increases or decreases respectively.

•      Scalability in aws has the ability to scale the computing resources up or down when demand increases or decreases respectively.

•      Elasticity in aws is defined as the distribution of incoming application traffic across multiple targets such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions.

•      Elasticity load balancing and scalability automatically scale your AWS computing resources to meet unexpected demand and scale down automatically when demand decreases.

•      AWS provides a scalable cloud-computing platform that provides customers with end-to-end security and end-to-end privacy.

•      AWS maintains confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data which is the utmost importance of the aws.

14. Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps is a Software as a service (SaaS) platform from Microsoft that provides an end-to-end DevOps toolchain for developing and deploying software.  It also integrates with most leading tools on the market and is a great option for orchestrating a DevOps toolchain.

Features

•      As a SaaS offering, Azure DevOps is reliable, scalable, and globally available

•      Azure DevOps comprises a range of services covering the full development life-cycle.  At the time of writing these are:

•      Azure Boards: agile planning, work item tracking, visualisation and reporting tool.

•      Azure Pipelines: a language, platform and cloud agnostic CI/CD platform with support for containers or Kubernetes.

•      Azure Repos: provides cloud-hosted private git repos.

•      Azure Artifacts: provides integrated package management with support for Maven, npm, Python and NuGet package feeds from public or private sources.

•      Azure Test Plans: provides an integrated planned and exploratory testing solution.

15. Apache ant

Apache Ant (Another Neat Tool) is an open-source project started by Apache Software Foundation. Ant is a Java library and a software tool used to automate software build processes such as compiling, running, testing and assembling Java applications. It is designed and developed by Apache Software Foundation and initially released on 19 July 2000.

It is a better alternative of Make build tool of Unix. Ant is written in Java and require JVM to build the Java projects.

Features

•      Apache Ant is an open source library. It allows user to access source code and reproduce it. Ant has open source software license. It can be used to study, redistribute

•      Ant is very flexible in nature, it can be used with variety of programming languages without much effort. Apart from Java, other useful programming languages like C, C++ can also use Ant to automate their tasks.

•      Ant uses very simple syntax which is easy to learn and use. If a user already know about XML, it is more easy to work because Ant uses XML. It's build file is created using XML tags.

•      Apache Ant is cross-platform and handles Java class paths and file directory structures in aportable manner. It can execute on various platforms.

•      Apache Ant is extensible in nature, it is easy to extend. It can extensible using Java and other programming languages also.

16. Apache Tomcat

The Apache Tomcat software is an open-source implementation of the Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages, Java Expression Language, and Java WebSocket technologies.

Apache Tomcat is usually used as a Servlet Container even though Tomcat has a fully functional HTTP Server to serve static content. In most of the production, Tomcat is used in conjunction with Apache HTTP Server where Apache HTTP Server attends static content like HTML, images, etc., and forwards the requests for dynamic content to Tomcat. This is because Apache HTTP Server supports more advanced options than that of the Tomcat.

Features

•      The Apache software foundation provides regular updates to make it compatible with other software versions and providing bug fixes thus making it easier for developers to use.

•      Tomcat supports SSL( Secure Socket Layer) and therefore can be configured using an SSL certificate to secure sensitive data by providing a secure connection.

•      Tomcat can also be configured to run multiple web applications on different ports. For example, it could be running three applications on 8080, 8081, 9090 port numbers. By default, Apache tomcat makes use of port number 8080.

•      It’s also cross-platform compatible, that is can be used on Windows, Mac OS, Linux operating systems.

•      It’s said to be lightweight. That is it consumes less in terms of memory and resource utilization, thus allowing the application to run smoothly on most systems without specific system requirements.

17. Windows IIS Server

Internet Information Services (IIS) is a flexible, general-purpose web server from Microsoft that runs on Windows systems to serve requested HTML pages or files.

An IIS web server accepts requests from remote client computers and returns the appropriate response. This basic functionality allows web servers to share and deliver information across local area networks (LAN), such as corporate intranets, and wide area networks (WAN), such as the Internet.

Features

•      Ensure the Windows operating system is updated with all security patches.

•      Disable any features of IIS not in use to reduce potential attacks.

•      Use firewalls to ensure the server is only receiving valid packets.

•      Control which IP addresses and domains can access the web server.

•      Use URL authorization to apply rules for specific requests, such as dealing with particular URLs. A company can use URL authorization to only authorize certain users to view the requested pages.

•      Use logging to view the visitors accessing the web server.

•      Configure the error page to display only relevant information about an issue. Make certain that error pages don’t display too much information, such as usernames, passwords, the IP address of the server or any information that hackers could use to exploit the web server.

18. Nginx

NGINX is open source software for web serving, reverse proxying, caching, load balancing, media streaming, and more. It started out as a web server designed for maximum performance and stability. In addition to its HTTP server capabilities, NGINX can also function as a proxy server for email (IMAP, POP3, and SMTP) and a reverse proxy and load balancer for HTTP, TCP, and UDP servers.

Features

•      Reverse proxy with caching

•      IPV6

•      Load Balancing

•      Web Sockets

•      Handling of static files, index files, and auto-indexing

•      FastCGI support with caching

•      URL rewriting and redirection

19. Spunk

Splunk is a tool to make machine data usable, accessible, and valuable to everyone. It delivers operational intelligence to DevOps teams. It helps companies to be more secure, productive, and competitive.

Features

•      It has a next-generation monitoring and analytics solution.

•      It delivers a single, unified view of different IT services.

•      Extend the Splunk platform with purpose-built solutions for security.

•      Data drive analytics with actionable insight. 

20. Selenium

Selenium is a portable software testing framework for web applications. It provides an easy interface for developing automated tests.

Features

•      It is a free open source tool.

•      It supports multiplatform for testing, such as Android and ios.

•      It is easy to build a keyword-driven framework for a WebDriver.

•      It creates robust browser-based regression automation suites and tests.

Conclusion

DevOps improves communication and collaboration between IT infrastructure and operations teams to increase product quality and facilitate seamless working.

To fully benefit from DevOps and achieve market success, this approach requires the right tools. Choosing the right tools for your project will get the most out of the DevOps approach.

Hopefully, the above lists will assist in the process, enabling you to put together the right DevOps toolkit that meets your needs and takes your product to the next level.