Unit-II

Fundamentals of DevOps: Architecture, Deployments, Orchestration, Need, Instance of

Applications, DevOps delivery pipeline, DevOps eco system.

What is DevOps?
DevOps is a collaboration between Development and IT Operations to make software
production and Deployment in an automated & repeatable way. DevOps helps increase the
organization’s speed to deliver software applications and services. The full form of ‘DevOps’
is a combination of ‘Development’ and ‘Operations.’
It allows organizations to serve their customers better and compete more strongly in the market.
In simple words, DevOps can be defined as an alignment of development and IT operations
with better communication and collaboration.

Why is DevOps Needed?

• Before DevOps, the development and operation team worked in complete isolation.
• Testing and Deployment were isolated activities done after design-build. Hence they
consumed more time than actual build cycles.
• Without using DevOps, team members spend a large amount of their time testing,
deploying, and designing instead of building the project.
• Manual code deployment leads to human errors in production.
• Coding & operation teams have separate timelines and are not synch, causing further
delays.

There is a demand to increase the rate of software delivery by business stakeholders. As per
Forrester Consulting Study, Only 17% of teams can use delivery software quickly, proving the
pain point.
How is DevOps different from traditional IT
In this DevOps training, let’s compare the traditional software waterfall model with DevOps
to understand the changes DevOps brings.

We assume the application is scheduled to go live in 2 weeks, and coding is 80% done. We
assume the application is a fresh launch, and the process of buying servers to ship the code has
just begun-

Old Process DevOps

After placing an order for new
servers, the Development team After placing an order for new servers Development
works on testing. The Operations and Operations team work together on the paperwork
team works on extensive paperwork to set up the new servers. This results in better
as required in enterprises to deploy visibility of infrastructure requirements.
the infrastructure.
Projections about failover,
redundancy, data center locations, Projections about failover, redundancy, disaster
and storage requirements are skewed recovery, data center locations, and storage
as no inputs are available from requirements are pretty accurate due to the inputs from
developers who have deep the developers.
knowledge of the application.
In DevOps, the Operations team is completely aware
The operations team has no clue
of the developers’ progress. Operations teams interact
about the progress of the
with developers and jointly develop a monitoring plan
Development team. The operations
that caters to IT and business needs. They also use
team develops a monitoring plan as
advanced Application Performance Monitoring
per their understanding.
(APM) Tools.
Before going go-live, the load testing makes the
Before going go-live, the load
application a bit slow. The development team quickly
testing crashes the application, and
fixes the bottlenecks, and the application is released
the release is delayed.
on time.

Why is DevOps used?

DevOps allows Agile Development Teams to implement Continuous Integration and
Continuous Delivery, which helps them launch products faster into the market.

Other Important reasons are:

1. Predictability: DevOps offers a significantly lower failure rate of new releases.

2. Reproducibility: Version everything so that earlier versions can be restored anytime.

3. Maintainability: Effortless recovery process in the event of a new release crashing or

disabling the current system.

4. Time to market: DevOps reduces the time to market up to 50% through streamlined
software delivery. It is particularly the case for digital and mobile applications.

5. Greater Quality: DevOps helps the team improve application development quality by
incorporating infrastructure issues.

6. Reduced Risk: DevOps incorporates security aspects in the software delivery lifecycle, and
it helps reduce defects across the lifecycle.

7. Resiliency: The Operational state of the software system is more stable, secure, and changes
are auditable.
8. Cost Efficiency: DevOps offers cost efficiency in the software development process, which
is always an aspiration of IT management.

9. Breaks larger code base into small pieces: DevOps is based on the agile programming
method. Therefore, it allows breaking larger codebases into smaller and manageable chunks.

When to adopt DevOps?

DevOps should be used for large distributed applications such as eCommerce sites or
applications hosted on a cloud platform.

When not to adopt DevOps?

It should not be used in mission-critical applications like banks, power and other sensitive data
sites. Such applications need strict access controls on the production environment, a detailed
change management policy, and access control policy to the data centres.

DevOps Workflow
Workflows provide a visual overview of the sequence in which input is provided. It also tells
about performed actions, and output is generated for an operations process.

DevOps WorkFlow
Workflow allows the ability to separate and arrange jobs that the users top request. It also can
mirror their ideal process in the configuration jobs.

How is DevOps different from Agile? DevOps Vs Agile

Stakeholders and communication chain a typical IT process.
Agile addresses gaps in Customer and Developer communications

Agile Process
DevOps addresses gaps in Developer and IT Operations communications

DevOps Process

Difference between DevOps and Agile

Agile DevOps

Emphasize breaking down barriers between DevOps is about software deployment and
developers and management. operation teams.

Addresses gaps between customer Addresses the gap between the development
requirements and development teams. and Operation team

Focuses more on functional and non- It focuses on operational and business

functional readiness readiness.
DevOps emphasises deploying software in
Agile development pertains mainly to the
the most reliable and safest ways that aren’t
company’s way development is thought out.
always the fastest.
Agile development emphasises training all
team members to have varieties of similar and DevOps likes to divide and conquer,
equal skills. So that, when something goes spreading the skill set between the
wrong, any team member can get assistance development and operation teams. It also
from any member in the absence of the team maintains consistent communication.
leader.

Agile development manages on “sprints”. It

DevOps strives for consolidated deadlines
means that the timetable is much shorter (less
and benchmarks with significant releases
than a month), and several features are to be
rather than smaller and more frequent ones.
produced and released in that period.

DevOps Principles
Here are six principles that are essential when adopting DevOps:

1. Customer-Centric Action: The DevOps team must constantly take customer-centric action
to invest in products and services.

2. End-To-End Responsibility: The DevOps team needs to provide performance support until
they become end-of-life. This enhances the level of responsibility and the quality of the
products engineered.

3. Continuous Improvement: DevOps culture focuses on continuous improvement to

minimize waste, and it continuously speeds up the improvement of products or services offered.

4. Automate everything: Automation is a vital principle of the DevOps process, and this is
not only for software development but also for the entire infrastructure landscape.

5. Work as one team: In the DevOps culture, the designer, developer, and tester are already
defined, and all they need to do is work as one team with complete collaboration.

6. Monitor and test everything: Monitor and test everything: The DevOps team needs robust
monitoring and testing procedures.

Who is a DevOps Engineer?

A DevOps Engineer is an IT professional who works with software developers, system
operators, and other production IT staff to administer code releases. DevOps should have hard
and soft skills to communicate and collaborate with development, testing, and operations
teams.

The DevOps approach needs frequent, incremental changes to code versions, requiring frequent
deployment and testing regimens. Although DevOps engineers need to code occasionally from
scratch, they must have the basics of software development languages.

A DevOps engineer will work with development team staff to tackle the coding and scripting
needed to connect code elements, like libraries or software development kits.
Roles, Responsibilities, and Skills of a DevOps Engineer
DevOps engineers work full-time, and they are responsible for the production and ongoing
maintenance of a software application’s platform.

Following are some expected Roles, Responsibilities, and Skills that are expected from
DevOps engineers:

• Able to perform system troubleshooting and problem-solving across platform and

application domains.
• Manage project effectively through open, standards-based platforms
• Increase project visibility thought traceability
• Improve quality and reduce development cost with collaboration
• Analyse, design and evaluate automation scripts & systems
• Ensuring critical resolution of system issues by using the best cloud security solutions
services
• DevOps engineers should have the soft skill of problem-solver and quick-learner

DevOps Architecture

Development and operations both play essential roles in order to deliver applications. The
deployment comprises analyzing the requirements, designing, developing, and testing of the
software components or frameworks.

The operation consists of the administrative processes, services, and support for the software.
When both the development and operations are combined with collaborating, then the DevOps
architecture is the solution to fix the gap between deployment and operation terms; therefore,
delivery can be faster.

DevOps architecture is used for the applications hosted on the cloud platform and large
distributed applications. Agile Development is used in the DevOps architecture so that
integration and delivery can be contiguous. When the development and operations team works
separately from each other, then it is time-consuming to design, test, and deploy. And if the
terms are not in sync with each other, then it may cause a delay in the delivery. So DevOps
enables the teams to change their shortcomings and increases productivity.

Below are the various components that are used in the DevOps architecture:

1) Build
Without De Without DevOps, the cost of the consumption of the resources was evaluated based
on the pre-defined individual usage with fixed hardware allocation. And with DevOps, the
usage of cloud, sharing of resources comes into the picture, and the build is dependent upon
the user's need, which is a mechanism to control the usage of resources or capacity.
2) Code

Many good practices such as Git enables the code to be used, which ensures writing the code
for business, helps to track changes, getting notified about the reason behind the difference in
the actual and the expected output, and if necessary reverting to the original code developed.
The code can be appropriately arranged in files, folders, etc. And they can be reused.
3) Test

The application will be ready for production after testing. In the case of manual testing, it
consumes more time in testing and moving the code to the output. The testing can be automated,
which decreases the time for testing so that the time to deploy the code to production can be
reduced as automating the running of the scripts will remove many manual steps.

4) Plan

DevOps use Agile methodology to plan the development. With the operations and development
team in sync, it helps in organizing the work to plan accordingly to increase productivity.

5) Monitor

Continuous monitoring is used to identify any risk of failure. Also, it helps in tracking the
system accurately so that the health of the application can be checked. The monitoring becomes
more comfortable with services where the log data may get monitored through many third-
party tools such as Splunk.

6) Deploy

Many systems can support the scheduler for automated deployment. The cloud management
platform enables users to capture accurate insights and view the optimization scenario,
analytics on trends by the deployment of dashboards.

7) Operate

DevOps changes the way traditional approach of developing and testing separately. The teams
operate in a collaborative way where both the teams actively participate throughout the service
lifecycle. The operation team interacts with developers, and they come up with a monitoring
plan which serves the IT and business requirements.

8) Release

Deployment to an environment can be done by automation. But when the deployment is made
to the production environment, it is done by manual triggering. Many processes involved in
release management commonly used to do the deployment in the production environment
manually to lessen the impact on the customers.

Features of DevOps Architecture

Below are the key features of DevOps Architecture.

1. Automation
Automation most effectively reduces the time consumption specifically during the testing and

deployment phase. The productivity increases and releases are made quicker through
automation with less issue as tests are executed more rigorously. This will lead to catching

bugs sooner so that it can be fixed more easily. For continuous delivery, each code change is

done through automated tests, through cloud-based services and builds. This promotes

production using automated deploys.

2. Collaboration
The Development and Operations team collaborates together as DevOps team which improves

the cultural model as the teams become more effective with their productivity which

strengthens accountability and ownership. The teams share their responsibilities and work

closely in sync which in turn makes the deployment to production faster.

3. Integration
Applications need to be integrated with other components in the environment. The integration

phase is where the existing code is integrated with new functionality and then testing takes

place. Continuous integration and testing enable continuous development. The frequency in the

releases and micro-services lead to significant operational challenges. To overcome such

challenges, continuous integration and delivery are implemented to deliver in a quicker, safer

and reliable manner.

4. Configuration Management
This ensures that the application only interacts with the resources concerned with the

environment in which it runs. The configuration files are created where the configuration

external to the application is separated from the source code. The configuration file can be

written while deployment or they can be loaded at the run time depending on the environment

in which it is running.

DevOps Orchestration
DevOps orchestration is a logical and necessary step for any DevOps shop that is in the
process of, or has completed, implementing automation. Organizations generally start with a
local solution and then, after achieving success, orchestrate their best practices through a
technology that unifies connectivity into one solid process. That’s because automation can
only go so far in maximizing efficiency, so orchestration in DevOps is needed if you want to
take your releases to the next level.

To illustrate this concept, I’m going to discuss DevOps orchestration in general and how
practices like DevOps provisioning orchestration and DevOps release orchestration can apply
both on-site and in the cloud.

DevOps Orchestration Basics

Define orchestration in DevOps:

DevOps automation is a process by which a single, repeatable task, such as launching an app
or changing a database entry, is made capable of running without human intervention, both
on PCs and in the cloud. In comparison, DevOps orchestration is the automation of numerous
tasks that run at the same time in a way that minimizes production issues and time to market.

Automation applies to functions that are common to one area, such as launching a web
server, or integrating a web app, or changing a database entry. But when all of these functions
must work together, DevOps orchestration is required.

DevOps Orchestration – The Following Move after Automation

DevOps orchestration involves automating multiple processes to reduce issues leading to the
production date and shorten time to market. On the other hand, automation is used to perform
tasks or a series of actions that are repetitive.

DevOps orchestration is not simply putting separated tasks together, but it can do much more
than that. DevOps orchestration streamlines the entire workflow by centralizing all tools used
across teams, along with their data, to keep track of process and completion status
throughout.

Besides, automation can be pretty complicated at scale, although normally it is focused on a

specific operation to achieve a goal, such as a server deployment. When automation has
reached its limitations, that’s when orchestration plays to its strengths.

Why Invest in DevOps Orchestration?

SIX REASONS TO INVENST DEVOPS ORCHESTRATION
1. Speed up the automation process
2. Enhance cross-functional collaboration
3. Release products with higher quality
4. Lower costs for IT infrastructure and
human resources
5. Build transparency across the SDLC
6. Improve the release velocity

Investing in DevOps Orchestration helps you:

1. Speed up the automation process

DevOps orchestration helps users deliver new builds into production quickly and seamlessly
without putting much effort into these repetitive tasks. As a result, DevOps teams can focus
on other critical projects and decision-making.

2. Enhance cross-functional collaboration

DevOps orchestration is a platform that constantly unifies and updates all activities to
improve communication between operation and development teams, so every member is in
sync in all steps.

3. Release products with higher quality

DevOps orchestration helps teams reduce software errors before reaching the end-user by
controlling approvals, scheduling, security testing, automatic status reports.

4. Lower costs for IT infrastructure and human resources

Another benefit of DevOps orchestration is cutting infrastructure investment costs and the
number of IT employees. In the long run, businesses can also expand their cloud service
footprint and allocate costs flexibly.

5. Build transparency across the SDLC

Siloed tasks and information cause difficulty in creating clarity and openness throughout a
project. DevOps orchestration helps businesses coordinate all tasks, centralize all operations’
data, and allow key stakeholders to gain visibility into new updates and progress during the
development lifecycle.

6. Improve the release velocity

DevOps orchestration also requires considerable automation and the automated progression
of software through testing and releasing pipeline processes. As businesses can reduce the
time of finishing manual tasks and deliver the program to the upcoming step in the process,
software reaches the end-user more quickly, wait time is turned aside to the next project.
With that reason, a higher level of automation helps release products faster, save money and
increase profits.

DevOps Applications
Applications of DevOps
1. Application of DevOps in the Online Financial Trading Company
The methodology in the process of testing, building, and development was automated in the
financial trading company. Using the DevOps, deployment was being done within 45 seconds.
These deployments used to take long nights and weekends for the employees. The time of the
overall process reduced and the interest of clients increased.
2. Use of DevOps in Network cycling
Deployment, testing and rapid designing became ten times faster. It became effortless for the
telco service provider to add patches of security every day, which used to be done only every
three months. Through deployment and design, the new version of network cycling was being
rolled out.
3. Application in Car Manufacturing Industries
Using DevOps, employees helped car manufacturers to catch the error while scaling the
production, which was not possible before.
4. Benefits to Airlines Industries
With the benefit of DevOps, United Airlines saved $500,000 by changing to continuous testing
standards. It also increased its coverage of code by 85%.
5. Application to GM Financial
Regression testing time was reduced by 93%, which in turn reduced the funding
period of load by five times.
6. Bug Reduction Benefit of DevOps
DevOps has reduced the bugs by up to 35% and in many cases of pre-production bugs up to
40%. By using DevOps, Rabobank was able to provide better quality applications for their
clients within less time because it massively reduced the time taken for regression testing.
7. Less Time for Integration
Key Bank used DevOps to reduce the time taken for the integration of security and compliance
into the process from 3 months to 1 week.
8. Decreased Computation Cost and Operation Time
By the use of DevOps, Computation time has been dramatically reduced. In many cases, it has
reduced the computing time from up to 60%. When the time taken to complete a task is
decreased, then the cost involved the process also decreases.
9. Faster Development of Software
The DevOps helps in the faster delivery of apps because it ensures speedier delivery.
10. Improvement in Team Collaboration
Transparency is required for better decision-making and works better efficiency of resources.
By using DevOps, teams can be more transparent in their work of developing applications and
software. There are many big tasks of a project which are broken down into many small tasks
that are allotted to different teams or people in the organisation.
11. Reliable Environments for Operations
DevOps provide a better environment that is more stable for the team to work together. The
people in the group can rely on the environment for all kinds of operations and tasks.
12. Early Defects Detection
In the environment of DevOps, the error and the defects can be known at a very first stage.
DevOps helps in the fast detection of defects.
13. Faster Correction
With the help of DevOps, All the defects are detected very early. Because of this, mistakes can
be corrected very fast. There is a lot of time which gets saved in this kind of DevOps
environment because the work is very fast, so the correction work is also completed very fast.
14. Continuous Operation of Monitoring, Testing, Deployment, and Release
There is a massive demand for software professionals to keep on delivering high-quality
applications and software. DevOps Developer salary is ever increasing in India. A software
development team is expected to develop the software application within a shorter time period
which can be launched into the market. The team of software is required to adopt a shorter
release cycle.
All of the requirements of delivering high-quality software, developing software applications
in less time frame. Also, a minimum period to launch the software applications and short
release cycles can only be fulfilled by the use of DevOps.
15. Increased Focus on Operations
When less time is taken for the tasks and operation with the help of DevOps, It allows one
person to focus more on the quality of activities and functions. There is more time for one to
give his quality work because now there is DevOps minimize more time to focus as all the time
for other services.
16. Automation Testing integration into DevOps
When the framework of automated testing is integrated into the DevOps, It helps to save a lot
of money and time, which then increases the available time and quality of the work.
Top DevOps Tools for 2020
1) Jenkins
DevOps are divided into different stages. For integrating them, you’d need to perform
Continous Integration (CI). Jenkins is the tool that can help you in that regard. Jenkins enables
companies to boost their software development processes. Developers use Jenkins to test their
software projects and add changes seamlessly.

This tool uses Java with plugins, which help in enhancing Continuous Integration. Jenkins is
widely popular with more 1 million users. So also get access to a thriving and helpful
community of developers.
2) Git
It is a version control system, and it lets teams collaborate on a project at the same time.
Developers can track changes in their files, as well as improve the product regularly. Git is
widely popular among tech companies. Many companies consider it is a must-have for their
tech professionals.
You can save different versions of your code on Git. You can use GitHub for holding
repositories as well. GitHub allows you to connect Slack with your on-going projects so your
team can easily communicate regarding the project.
3) Bamboo
Bamboo is similar to Jenkins as it helps you in automating your delivery pipeline. The
difference is of their prices. Jenkins is free, but Bamboo is not. Is bamboo worth paying for?
Well, Bamboo has many functionalities which are set up beforehand. With Jenkins, you
would’ve had to build those functionalities yourself. And that takes a lot of effort and time.
Bamboo doesn’t require you to use many plugins too because it can do those tasks itself. It has
a great UI, and it integrates with BitBucket and many other Atlassian products.

4) Kubernetes
Kubernetes deserves a place on this DevOps tools list for obvious reasons. First, it is a fantastic
container orchestration platform. Second, it has taken the industry by storm.
When you have many containers to take care of, scaling the tasks becomes immensely
challenging. Kubernetes helps you in solving that problem by automating the management of
your containers.

It is an open-source platform. Kubernetes can let you scale your containers without increasing
your team. As it is an open-source platform, you don’t have to worry about access problems.
You can use public cloud infrastructure or hybrid infrastructure to your advantage. The tool
can also self-heal containers. This means it can restart failed containers, kills not-responding
containers, and replaces containers.
5) Vagrant
You can build and manage virtual machine environments on Vagrant. It lets you do all that in
a single workflow. You can use it on Mac, Windows, as well as, Linux.
It provides you with an ideal development environment for better productivity and
efficiency. It can easily integrate with multiple kinds of IDEs and configuration management
tools such as Salt, Chef, and Ansible.

Because it works on local systems, your team members won’t have to give up their existing
technologies or operating systems. Vagrant’s enhanced development environments certainly
make DevOps easier for your team. That’s why we have kept it in our DevOps tools list.
6) Prometheus
Prometheus is an open-source service monitoring system, which you can use for free. It has
multiple custom libraries you can implement quickly.
It identifies time series through metric names and key-value pairs. You can use its different
modes for data visualization as well. Because of its functional sharding and federation, scaling
the projects is quite easy.

It also enables multiple integrations from different platforms, such as Docker and StatsD. It
supports more than ten languages. Overall, you can easily say it is among the top DevOps tools
because of its utility.
7) Splunk
Splunk makes machine data more accessible and valuable. It enables your organization to use
the available data in a better fashion. With its help, you can easily monitor and analyze the
available data and act accordingly. Splunk also lets you get a unified look at all the IT data
present in your enterprise.
You can deliver insights by using augmented reality and mobile devices, too, with the use of
Splunk. From security to IT, Splunk finds uses in many areas. It is one of the best automation
tools for DevOps because of the valuable insights it provides to the user. You can use Splunk
in numerous ways according to your organization’s requirements.
Some companies also use Splunk for business analytics and IoT analytics. The point is, you
can use this tool for finding valuable data insights for all the sections of your organization and
use them better.
8) Sumologic
Sumologic is a popular CI platform for DevSecOps. It enables organizations to develop and
secure their applications on the cloud. It can detect Indicators of Compromise quickly, which
lets you investigate and resolve the threat faster.

Its real-time analytics platform helps organizations in using data for predictive analysis. For
monitoring and securing your cloud applications, you should choose Sumologic. Because of
its power of the elastic cloud, you can scale it infinitely (in theory).

What is a DevOps Pipeline?

A DevOps pipeline is a set of practices that the development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams
implement to build, test, and deploy software faster and easier. One of the primary purposes of
a pipeline is to keep the software development process organized and focused.

The term "pipeline" might be a bit misleading, though. An assembly line in a car factory might
be a more appropriate analogy since software development is a continuous cycle.

Before the manufacturer releases the car to the public, it must pass through numerous assembly
stages, tests, and quality checks. Workers have to build the chassis, add the motor, wheels,
doors, electronics, and a finishing paint job to make it appealing to customers.

DevOps pipelines work similarly.

Before releasing an app or a new feature to users, you first have to write the code. Then, make
sure that it does not lead to any fatal errors that might cause the app to crash. Avoiding such a
scenario involves running various tests to fish out any bugs, typos, or mistakes. Finally, once
everything is working as intended, you can release the code to users.

From this simplified explanation, you can conclude that a DevOps pipeline consists of the
build, test, and deploy stages.

Components of a DevOps Pipeline

To ensure the code moves from one stage to the next seamlessly requires implementing several
DevOps strategies and practices. The most important among them are continuous
integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).

Continuous Integration

Continuous integration (CI) is a method of integrating small chunks of code from multiple
developers into a shared code repository as often as possible. With a CI strategy, you can
automatically test the code for errors without having to wait on other team members to
contribute their code.

One of the key benefits of CI is that it helps large teams prevent what is known as integration
hell.

In the early days of software development, developers had to wait for a long time to submit
their code. That delay significantly increased the risk of code-integration conflicts and the
deployment of bad code. As opposed to the old way of doing things, CI encourages developers
to submit their code daily. As a result, they can catch errors faster and, ultimately, spend less
time fixing them.

At the heart of CI is a central source control system. Its primary purpose is to help teams
organize their code, track changes, and enable automated testing.

In a typical CI set-up, whenever a developer pushes new code to the shared code repository,
automation kicks in to compile the new and existing code into a build. If the build process fails,
developers get an alert which informs them which lines of code need to be reworked.

Making sure only quality code passes through the pipeline is of paramount importance.
Therefore, the entire process is repeated every time someone submits new code to the shared
repository.

Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery (CD) is an extension of CI. It involves speeding up the release process by
encouraging developers to release code to production in incremental chunks.

Having passed the CI stage, the code build moves to a holding area. At this point in the pipeline,
it's up to you to decide whether to push the build to production or hold it for further evaluation.
In a typical DevOps scenario, developers first push their code into a production-like
environment to assess how it behaves. However, the new build can also go live right away, and
developers can deploy it at any time with a push of a button.

To take full advantage of continuous delivery, deploy code updates as often as possible. The
release frequency depends on the workflow, but it's usually daily, weekly, or monthly.
Releasing code in smaller chunks is much easier to troubleshoot compared to releasing all
changes at once. As a result, you avoid bottlenecks and merge conflicts, thus maintaining a
steady, continuous integration pipeline flow.

Continuous Deployment

Continuous delivery and continuous deployment are similar in many ways, but there are critical
differences between the two.

While continuous delivery enables development teams to deploy software, features, and code
updates manually, continuous deployment is all about automating the entire release cycle.

At the continuous deployment stage, code updates are released automatically to the end-user
without any manual interventions. However, implementing an automated release strategy can
be dangerous. If it fails to mitigate all errors detected along the way, bad code will get deployed
to production. In the worst-case scenario, this may cause the application to break or users to
experience downtime.

Automated deployments should only be used when releasing minor code updates. In case
something goes wrong, you can roll back the changes without causing the app to malfunction.

To leverage the full potential of continuous deployment involves having robust testing
frameworks that ensure the new code is truly error-free and ready to be immediately deployed
to production.

Continuous Testing

Continuous testing is a practice of running tests as often as possible at every stage of the
development process to detect issues before reaching the production environment.
Implementing a continuous testing strategy allows quick evaluation of the business risks of
specific release candidates in the delivery pipeline.

The scope of testing should cover both functional and non-functional tests. This includes
running unit, system, integration, and tests that deal with security and performance aspects of
an app and server infrastructure.

Continuous testing encompasses a broader sense of quality control that includes risk
assessment and compliance with internal policies.

Continuous Operations

Having a comprehensive continuous operations strategy helps maintain maximum availability

of apps and environments. The goal is for users to be unaware that of constantly releasing code
updates, bug fixes, and patches. A continuous operations strategy can help prevent downtime
and availability issues during code release.

To reap the benefits of continuous operations, you need to have a robust automation and
orchestration architecture that can handle continuous performance monitoring of servers,
databases, containers, networks, services, and applications.

Phases of DevOps Pipeline

There are no fixed rules as to how you should structure the pipeline. DevOps teams add and
remove certain stages depending on their specific workflows. Still, four core stages make up
almost every pipeline: develop, build, test, and deploy.

That set-up can be extended by adding two more stages - plan and monitor - since they are
also quite common in professional DevOps environments.

Plan

The planning stage involves planning out the entire workflow before developers start coding.
In this stage, product managers and project managers play an essential role. It's their job to
create a development roadmap that will guide the whole team along the process.

After gathering feedback and relevant information from users and stakeholders, the work is
broken down into a list of tasks. By segmenting the project into smaller, manageable chunks,
teams can deliver results faster, resolve issues on the spot, and adapt to sudden changes easier.

In a DevOps environment, teams work in sprints - a shorter period of time (usually two weeks
long) during which individual team members work on their assigned tasks.

Develop

In the Develop stage, developers start coding. Depending on the programming language,
developers install on their local machines appropriate IDEs (Python IDEs, Java IDEs, etc),
code editors, and other technologies for achieving maximum productivity.

In most cases, developers have to follow certain coding styles and standards to ensure a uniform
coding pattern. This makes it easier for any team member to read and understand the code.
When developers are ready to submit their code, they make a pull request to the shared source
code repository. Team members can then manually review the newly submitted code and merge
it with the master branch by approving the initial pull request.

Build

The build phase of a DevOps pipeline is crucial because it allows developers to detect errors
in the code before they make their way down the pipeline and cause a major disaster.

After the newly written code has been merged with the shared repository, developers run a
series of automated tests. In a typical scenario, the pull request initiates an automated process
that compiles the code into a build - a deployable package or an executable.

Keep in mind that some programming languages don't need to be compiled. For example,
applications written in Java and C need to be compiled to run, while those written
in PHP and Python do not.

If there is a problem with the code, the build fails, and the developer is notified of the issues.
If that happens, the initial pull request also fails.

Developers repeat this process every time they submit to the shared repository to ensure only
error-free code continues down the pipeline.

Test

If the build is successful, it moves to the testing phase. There, developers run manual and
automated tests to validate the integrity of the code further.

In most cases, a User Acceptance Test is performed. People interact with the app as the end-
user to determine if the code requires additional changes before sending it to production. At
this stage, it's also common to perform security, performance, and load testing.

Deploy

When the build reaches the Deploy stage, the software is ready to be pushed to production. An
automated deployment method is used if the code only needs minor changes. However, if the
application has gone through a major overhaul, the build is first deployed to a production-like
environment to monitor how the newly added code will behave.

Implementing a blue-green deployment strategy is also common when releasing significant

updates.

A blue-green deployment means having two identical production environments where one
environment hosts the current application while the other hosts the updated version. To release
the changes to the end-user, developers can simply forward all requests to the appropriate
servers. If there are problems, developers can simply revert to the previous production
environment without causing service disruptions.
Monitor

At this final stage in the DevOps pipeline, operations teams are hard at work continuously
monitoring the infrastructure, systems, and applications to make sure everything is running
smoothly. They collect valuable data from logs, analytics, and monitoring systems as well as
feedback from users to uncover any performance issues.

Feedback gathered at the Monitor stage is used to improve the overall efficiency of the DevOps
pipeline. It's good practice to tweak the pipeline after each release cycle to eliminate potential
bottlenecks or other issues that might hinder productivity.

How to Create a DevOps Pipeline

Now that you have a better understanding of what a DevOps pipeline is and how it works let's
explore the steps required when creating a CI/CD pipeline.

Set Up a Source Control Environment

Before you and the team start building and deploying code, decide where to store the source
code. GitHub is by far the most popular code-hosting website. GitLab and BitBucket are
powerful alternatives.

To start using GitHub, open a free account, and create a shared repository. To push code to
GitHub, first install Git on the local machine. Once you finish writing the code, push it to the
shared source code repository. If multiple developers are working on the same project, other
team members usually manually review the new code before merging it with the master branch.

Set Up a Build Server

Once the code is on GitHub, the next step is to test it. Running tests against the code helps
prevent errors, bugs, or typos from being deployed to users.

Numerous tests can determine if the code is production-ready. Deciding which analyses to run
depends on the scope of the project and the programming languages used to run the app.

Two of the most popular solutions for creating builds are Jenkins and Travis-CI. Jenkins is
completely free and open-source, while Travis-CI is a hosted solution that is also free but only
for open-source projects.

To start running tests, install Jenkins on a server and connect it to the GitHub repository. You
can then configure Jenkins to run every time changes are made to the code in the shared
repository. It compiles the code and creates a build. During the build process, Jenkins
automatically alerts if it encounters any issues.

Run Automated Tests

There are numerous tests, but the most common are unit tests, integration tests,
and functional tests.
Depending on the development environment, it's best to arrange automated tests to run one
after the other. Usually, you want to run the shortest tests at the beginning of the testing process.

For example, you would run unit tests before functional tests since they usually take more time
to complete. If the build passes the testing phase with flying colors, you can deploy the code to
production or a production-like environment for further evaluation.

Deploy to Production

Before deploying the code to production, first set up the server infrastructure. For instance, for
deploying a web app, you need to install a web server like Apache. Assuming the app will be
running in the cloud, you'll most likely deploy it to a virtual machine.

For apps that require the full processing potential of the physical hardware, you can deploy to
dedicated servers or bare metal cloud servers.

There are two ways to deploy an app - manually or automatically. At first, it is best to deploy
code manually to get a feel for the deployment process. Later, automation can speed up the
process, but only if you are confident, there are barriers that will stop bad code from ending up
in production.

Releasing code to production is a straightforward process. The easiest way to deploy is by

configuring the build server to execute a script that automatically releases the code to
production.

DevOps Tools Ecosystem

Plan
Planning is the initial stage, and it covers the first steps of project management. The project
and product ideas are presented and analyzed, in groups, alone, or on whiteboards. The
developer, team, and organization decide what they want and how they want it and assign tasks
to developers, QA engineers, product managers, etc. This stage requires lots of analysis of
problems and solutions, collaboration between team members, and the ability to capture and
track all that is being planned.

Develop
Developing is the stage where the ideas from planning are executed into code. The ideas come
to life as a product. This stage requires software configuration management, repository
management and build tools, and automated Continuous Integration tools for incorporating this
stage with the following ones.

Test
A crucial part that examines the product and service and makes sure they work in real time and
under different conditions (even extreme ones, sometimes). This stage requires many different
kinds of tests, mainly functional tests, performance or load tests, and service virtualization tests.
It’s also important to test compatibility and integrations with third-party services. The data
from the tests needs to be managed and analyzed in rich reports for improving the product
according to test results.

Release
Once a stage that stood out on its own and caused many a night with no sleep for developers,
now the release stage is becoming agile and integrating with the Continuous Delivery process.
Therefore, the discussion of this part can’t revolve only around tools, but rather needs to discuss
methodologies as well. Regarding tools, this stage requires deployment tools.

Operate
We now have a working product, but how can we maximize the features we’ve planned,
developed, tested, and released? This is what this stage is for. Implementing the best UX is a
big part of this, monitoring infrastructure, APMs, and aggregators, and analyzing Business
Intelligence (BI). This stage ensures our users get the most out of the product and can use it
error-free.

Obviously, this work cycle isn’t one-directional. We might use tools from a certain stage, move
on to the next, go back a stage, jump ahead two stages, and so on. Essentially, it all comes
down to a feedback loop. You plan and develop. The test fails, so you develop again. The test
passes, you release it, and you get information about customer satisfaction through
measurement tools like google analytics or A/B testing. Then, you re-discuss the same feature
to get better satisfaction out of the product, develop it again, etc. The most important part is
that you cover all stages, as we will do in the upcoming weeks.

Assignment -II Questions

1. Analyse the DevOps with traditional process

2. Analyse DevOps tools echosystem
3. Analyse the phases of Devops Pipeline
4. Analyse phases of DevOps Architecture
5. Analyse the principles of Devops and roles and responsibilities of DevOps Engineer