DevOps 101: A Beginner’s Guide to DevOps Practices

We hope you are here to take the first step in the booming software industry after envisioning a brighter future for your DevOps career. Once you have the spark for learning, then this roadmap should serve as a valuable reference as you start grooming your skills.

What is DevOps?

So, the word DevOps is a unique combination of? "development" and "operations." In practice, it's a union between the development and operations teams. It is a software development methodology that emphasizes the instant, step-by-step, and continuous delivery of products.

Why is it Needed?

This technology tool emerged to address challenges caused by the traditional practice of dividing development, testing, and operations into separate, isolated teams. This separation often hampers productivity since each team has unique goals, workflows, and timelines that may need to align with others. The systems development lifecycle aims to foster a more integrated development process. The approach offers other advantages, such as enhanced team productivity, faster release cycles, and more effective feedback channels.

DevOps lifecycle: Phase To Explore

In the whole development cycle, DevOps teams ensure the active participation of software developers, QA analysts, and product managers. This collaboration will work across the planning, development, delivery, and monitoring phases. Here's a breakdown of the continuous integration workflow:

• In the planning phase, the team identifies the challenges they aim to address and outlines strategies.
• During development, they build the product within a test or production environment through simulations or real-world user samples to fine-tune the solution before broad deployment.
• Next, the product is delivered to a broader audience.
• Finally, continuous monitoring ensures stable performance. Feedback from this stage is used to improve future iterations, looping the process back to the planning phase

DevOps Practices: You Must Master Them!

Several key practices define development and operation practices. These include:

1. Continuous Testing

This approach boosts software development efficiency by automating tests and feedback throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Code changes are deployed to a testing environment after builds to identify bugs early and prevent larger issues.

1. Continuous Integration (CI)

CI involves integrating stakeholder feedback and fixes frequently. This includes automating processes that merge updates and fostering a culture where changes are integrated seamlessly and regularly.

1. Continuous Delivery (CD)

CD ensures that product changes—usually in the form of code—are integrated and kept in a deployable state. Code can be released within short cycles, such as daily or weekly, ensuring rapid delivery.

Organizations typically release smaller, incremental updates in an operations environment instead of large-scale, resource-heavy ones. This allows for faster responses to customer feedback, unlike the traditional approach where siloed teams deploy extensive, infrequent updates.

DevOps tools

While software delivery is fundamentally a mindset, several automation tools play a crucial role in enhancing its efficiency:

Git

A version control system that tracks code changes and enables team collaboration on project updates.

Terraform

A leading open-source tool that simplifies managing multiple well-known service providers.

Docker

Used for containerizing applications, packaging them into unified bundles for smooth deployment.

Jenkins

Essential for building CI/CD pipelines and facilitating the development, testing, and deployment process.

Kubernetes

A widely used container orchestration platform for managing containers across clusters efficiently.

These tools, when used effectively, streamline development processes and enhance productivity.

A Parting note

DevOps practices like CI/CD create a pipeline that supports quick, iterative updates. Continuous deployment builds on this by adding real-time monitoring, testing, and updating after launch, ensuring ongoing improvements. To master DevOps skills for free, take an online course designed by highly skilled professionals at Hadi-E-Learning.