DevOps is the hot topic in the market these days. DevOps is a vague term used for wide number of operations, most agreeable defination of DevOps would be that DevOps is an intersection of development and operations. Certain practices need to be followed during the application release process in DevOps for a more streamline workflow, continuous delivery and continuous integration of the code and proper scaling for the application. In this article we will discuss the best DevOps practice you must know as a DevOps engineer/ DevOps enthusiast for Kubernetes in 2023.
DevOps: What It Is And Why It Matters?
DevOps is the intersection of development and operations. Development and operations are two main components in the whole application release process and a DevOps engineer works closely with both the development and the operations team and ensures that both the team rather than working in silos, work in an agile and collaborative environment understanding each other.
DevOps defines a combination of cultural philosophies practices and tools for a better application release process. DevOps is not just one set of tools or one specific concept, it’s a combination of anything that creates the process of releasing the software fast and with high quality. The main part of the concept was that developers and operations people should work together more often and collaborate better to achieve this releasing of software fast and with high quality.
What Is Kubernetes And Why Should You Care?
Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration framework originally developed by google, released on September 2014 and later donated to CNCF (Cloud Native Community Foundation). Kubernetes helps us manage applications that are made up of hundreds or even thousands of containers and it helps us manage these applications in different environments like physical machines, virtual machines, cloud environments or even hybrid deployment environments.
Kubernetes is the most popular and widely used container orchestration tool. It has a lot of use cases, major once are:
1. High availability of the application: this means that the application has no downtime so it’s always accessible to the users
2. Scalability: this means that application has a high performance, it loads fast and users have a very high response rates from the application.
3. Disaster recovery: this basically means that if an infrastructure has some problems like data is lost or the servers explode or something bad happens with the server center, the infrastructure has to have some kind of mechanism to pick up the data and to restore it to the latest state so that application doesn’t actually lose any data and can run again.
What is the Need Of DevOps?
The most important part of DevOps practices is tacking the challenge of miscommunication and lack of collaboration between developers and the operations team. Releasing application has two main parts – coding the application and the other part is deploying and maintaining the application. Developers are responsible for coding part while the operations team is responsible for running the application and between these two there might be a gap. The operations team wants to run the application but they don’t know how it works on the first place, and the developers would code without considering where or how the code will be deployed. While operations would try to deploy without really understanding what and why they are deploying or how the application even works. this would result in miscommunications between the two teams and causes not just less productivity and releasing the newer versions takes longer time, but also lesser quality applications being deployed without proper collaboration.
This is where DevOps comes into play. It brings the development and the operations team together to collaborate rather than work in silos and ensures high quality applications and features in lesser release time.
Key Benefits Of DevOps Practices
Here are some benefits of DevOps Practices:
1. Reducing Miscommunications
DevOps ensures proper communication of the operations and the development team so rather than working in silos, they come together and collaborate. This is very different than the Waterfall model of development where the two teams have least communication.
Note: Waterfall model refers to a linear model of developing and deploying applications where engineers works on one thing at a time and both the development and operations team work in silos not considering what the other team is up to.
2. Reducing release time
Consider a situation when developers finish coding but the deployment guide for the operations team is not good enough or well documented enough so operations team struggles deploying therefore, release takes longer. Or a situation when developers finish coding but the feature cannot be deployed because it has a lot of issues so the operations team throws it back with improvement suggestions. Even these kind of miscommunication and back and forth could cause stretching the release periods for days and weeks. DevOps team or DevOps engineer looks into this and create a channel of better communication and collaboration between the two teams to reduce the release time.
3. Reduces Conflicts of interest
In the traditional setup of Waterfall model of development where one team is only responsible for development and other team only for operations, these two have different incentives from the company/startup. These incentives makes it harder for them to work together. Developers want to push out new features fast because that’s their incentive. While operations team want to make sure those changes don’t break anything because operations team is incentivized to maintain stability in production and their main focus is to make sure the application is available doesn’t crash or show errors to the users. DevOps ensures both the team work for a common goal of delivering high quality applications and features in lesser release time rather than teams working for conflicting interests.
4. Reduces the application testing time
In many projects there are separate teams or roles for engineers who test the application changes on different levels like testing just the feature, testing the whole application and testing on multiple environments etc. These tests are mostly done manually. After the manual testing is done the change can be released and even though this may not be done by development or operations role but rather a separate role, this is an important part of the release process and also slows it down considerably. Manual work is slow and error prone, DevOps again comes in and automates the testing process and reduces the time taken for testing the features of the application.
DevOps Best Practices for Kubernetes
1. Test Automation
Through test automation we can safely release changes into production without the need for manual testing. many organizations use descriptions of tests that an engineer has to follow, this is slow, low quality, expensive , unreliable and error prone. It also results in hard to understand test cases. Therefore we must have an automated testing strategy. Automated test enables to test every behavior of the system that is important in a much faster, reliable and error free manner.
2. Deployment Automation
Deployment Automation means being able to deploy the software for testing in a single click/single step. Through this we want to be able to get our software deployed and available for use quickly. To adopt this practice in the DevOps workflow, we must control the variables. In order to be able to reliably and repeatably deploy the software wherever we want, we need to be able to understand the state and the environment that we are going to put these things into.
3. Trunk based development
Trunk based development is basically using of a single code branch or “Trunk” for all development work. Trunk is just the main branch where all the code is being merged. Trunk based development means merging changes to Trunk or Origin or Master or Head it at least once per day. You must be wondering why? What difference it makes? It makes a significant difference. State of DevOps report 2015 states that “Trunk based development predicts higher throughput and better stability”. Having branches or forks with very short lifetimes (this means less than a day) before being merged into Trunk are important aspects of continuous delivery. It contributes to higher performance.
4. Security testing as a part of deployment pipeline
Having security testing and validation as a part of the deployment pipeline helps in getting quicker feedback and reducing the time of feedback loop. Though this we want to bring the security testing earlier in the process so that we can work on it early, take feedback and iterate. Bringing the limelight to security in the development and deployment cycle is also referred as DevSecOps by many startups and companies.
5. Only testing the part where we made changes
This refers to making changes in one part of the system and not testing the whole system for a change in one part before releasing into production. This can be achieved by dividing the application into independently deployable modules that are each easier to to build, test and evaluate because they are smaller and simpler. Now we can build, test and deploy the pieces independently of one another hence saving time and resources.
6. Infrastructure as code (IaC)
Before Infrastructure as code and automation, in order to deploy an application on servers, we need to buy servers, configure them, install required software and basically prepare servers for deploying. This had few problems like
- High human resources cost
- More effort and time
- More human possible
That is what Infrastructure as code (IaC) solves for us. Infrastructure as code is a way of automating all the test end to end instead of doing it manually. With Infrastructure as code all the work of testing application manually by System admins and operations team is now done by set of programs like Ansible, Terraform, puppet etc.
7. Monitoring and observability
Monitoring is basically tooling that allows operations team to monitor and understand the state of their systems. It is based on gathering predefined sets of logs or metrics. Monitoring provides a comprehensive picture of the application’s behavior and performance with metrics such as network traffic, resource utilization and trends.
While observability is a technical solution or tooling that allows operations team to actively debug the system. It provides us the visibility and awareness about what is happening within an application. Both Monitoring and Observability are essential practices for DevOps.
Role and Responsibilities of a DevOps engineer
There are few responsibilities that a DevOps engineer has to perform and some tasks you will be expected to perform as a DevOps engineer on a day to day basis. These roles and responsibilities depends and defers from company to company based upon their requirements. listing down below the most important tasks, roles and responsibilities of a DevOps engineer:
- To automate the CI (continuous integration) part.
- To maintain the code and version control (git).
- To collaborate with developers team for integrating code to production.
- To monitor the performance of the application.
- To respond to system failures and troubleshooting if any error arises.
- To maintain and scale the cloud infrastructure.
- To ensure the security of application.
- To write scripts for automation using Python or Golang.
- To provide support to the production environment.
Conclusion
DevOps as a term is used in different context by different companies with different goals, but at its core DevOps is a set of process to bring together the Development and the Operations team for a better application release process and reducing time for making releases. There are few DevOps process that if taken care of highly improves the overall productivity of the development and operations team, reduces the release time, streamlines testing and create a continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline.
In this article we provided you with the most important DevOps practices that you must take care of for ensuring a better overall application development, release and maintenance process. We hope that this article improved you understanding of the various DevOps principles and practices and helped you in your journey of learning DevOps. Ending this article by a quote from the most respected person in DevOps and cloud, the founder of Linux, Linus Torvalds showing the importance of continuous integration and Truck based DevOps.
FAQs On DevOps
1. Should We Know Coding For Getting A DevOps Role?
Yes, for writing automation scripts as a DevOps engineer, you must have a good knowledge of programming.
2. Which Is The Best Programming Language For DevOps?
Most of the DevOps engineers use Python or Golang as their primary programming language for DevOps.
3. Is Kubernetes Important For DevOps?
Kubernetes is very important for DevOps and cloud in general.
4. Is DevOps And DevRel The Same?
No, DevOps is completely a different role than DevRel. DevRel is more about developer relations and developer advocacy.
5. Should We Know Both Development And Operations For DevOps?
Yes, DevOps is an intersection or collaboration of development team and operations team. Therefore, a DevOps engineer is expected to understand both.
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