10 key points of the DevOps Lifecycle
In a DevOps culture, everyone is responsible for the end result. This means that the emerging problem is a common one, and everyone should be maximally interested in its elimination.
Continuous integration and use of automation tools help improve the efficiency of software development and operation. But DevOps itself, as a discipline at the intersection of development, testing and operation, implies not only certain technologies and processes, but also a culture of interaction in a team.
Consider the key points of the DevOps life cycle.
- Automation.
Automate everything you can. Which is impossible, too. So that all processes for testing, building and deploying the application, rolling out updates and collecting feedback are carried out automatically.
- Acceleration of release, including through simplification of the development process.
This principle emphasizes the direct connection between the DevOps ideology and the needs of the business: the sooner the customer receives the final working product, the higher the efficiency and competitiveness of his business will be. Therefore, DevOps actively uses best practices that help, improve monitoring processes or reduce the time spent on the processes of delivering a product to a user.
- Getting quick feedback.
It is the DevOps methodology that made it possible to speed up this process, and most importantly, to promptly make adjustments to the product and make updates to the OS from users.
- Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI / CD)
With the help of continuous integration, developers have the ability to quickly add changes to the main code. It is automatically tested immediately, which improves the stability of the application.
- Continuous testing.
The process of running continuous security tests allows you to fully control the process and quickly respond to emerging problems.
- Version control.
This keeps track of all fixes and changes to the code, which helps to simplify the process of analyzing and recovering from errors. Version control systems allow the development team to collaboratively create code, ensuring that changes in files are consolidated, conflicts are resolved, and, if necessary, rolled back to earlier versions. Thus, the tasks of writing code are divided between the teams, all the code can be restored in case of problems, this significantly speeds up development.
- Availability of standards.
For DevOps, it is important to have templates and standards for configuring and using certain tools. Thanks to this, in DataArt a complex process involving both development, testing and operation does not turn into “chaos”, but, on the contrary, gets the opportunity to automate each stage.
- Configuration management.
This allows you to manage the state of resources (servers, virtual machines, and databases) on the system. By using specific tools, the DevOps engineer can roll out changes in a controlled and systematic manner, while minimizing the risks of configuration changes. And also track the current state of the system and any changes / deviations in the configuration from its desired state.
- Continuous monitoring.
The technique involves monitoring in real time the performance and health of the application. To do this, certain telemetry and metadata metrics are automatically collected, and alerts about deviations in the application are configured.
- Using the following tools will be effective for most tasks:
- Planning and evaluation — JIRA.
- Version control — Git, Mercurial, GitHub / BitBucket / GitLab hosting.
- Containerization tools — Docker, rkt, CRI-O, Swarm, Nomad by HashiCorp, Kubernetes.
- Building and testing the application — Jenkins, TeamCity, GitLab CI, Bamboo.
- Continuous deployment and management of infrastructure as code — Puppet, Chef, Ansible, SaltStack.
- Cloud resource management — Terraform.
- Monitoring and alerting — Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, DataDog, AlertManager, PagerDuty.
The list is constantly expanding and replenished with new tools, which is why DevOps is not a static discipline, but a constant path of self-education and improvement of both your knowledge and the work of applications entrusted to you.
