DEV Community: Niloshima Srivastava

Learning DevOps is a FUN - II

Niloshima Srivastava — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 12:43:58 +0000

In the previous article of this series, we learnt about what is DevOps and its history. In this article, we will understand DevOps’ background and how it is going to add value in your organization and day to day life.
In this article, we will be reading about –
• Challenges that DevOps solve
• Pre-DevOps Scenario
• DevOps Goals

Challenges That DevOps Solve
Prior to DevOps application development, teams were in charge of gathering business requirements for a software program and writing code. Then a separate QA team tests the program in an isolated environment, if requirements were met, releases the code for operations to deploy. The deployment teams are further fragmented into soiled groups like networking and database. Each time a software program is “thrown over the wall” to an independent team, it adds bottlenecks. The problem with this is when the teams works separately –
• Dev is often unaware of QA and Ops roadblocks that prevent the program from working as anticipated.
• QA and Ops are typically working across many features and have a little context of the business purpose and value of the software.
• Each group has opposing goals that can lead to inefficiency and finger-pointing when something goes wrong.
These are a couple of scenarios which are solved by DevOps, making the whole process seamless from execution to deployment, with the help of the tools.
According to the Xebia Labs – there is this whole periodic tables of DevOps tools, shown as below –

There is a whole suite of tools available to perform DevOps, you will have to learn about how to use, what tools and when to use them.

Pre-DevOps Scenario and How DevOps helps
A very common pre-DevOps scenario – the software tea meets prior to starting a new software project. The team includes developers, testers, operations and support professionals. This team plans how to create working software that is ready for deployment. The dev Team that has a goal to ship as many features kicks a new release to QA, then the tester’s goal is to find as many bugs as possible. When the testers bring their findings to Dev, the developers become defensive and blame the testers that are testing the environment for bugs. The testers respond that it isn’t their testing environment, but the developer’s code that is the problem.
Eventually, the issues get worked out and QA kicks the debugged new releases to Ops. The Ops team’s goal is to limit changes to their system, but they apprehensively release the code and system crashes, and the finger-pointing resumes. Ops says that the Dev provided them faulty artefacts. Dev says everything worked fine in the test environment. The fire drills begin to debug the system and get the production stable. The production environment is not Dev’s and QA’s responsibility, so they keep their hands off while Ops spends all night fixing the production issues.
Now how DevOps helps this – each new code is deployed as the developers complete it. Automation testing ensures that the code is ready to be deployed. After the code passes all the automation testing it is deployed to a small number of users, let’s say the UAT environment. This piece of code is monitored for a short period of time to ensure that there are no unforeseen problems and it definitely has to be stable. This new piece of code is then proliferated to the remaining users once the monitoring shows that it is stable. And the best of all – many of these steps after planning and development are done with no human interactions.
DevOps Goals
According to 2015 State of DevOps report – high performing IT organizations deploy 30x more frequently with 200x shorter lead times; they have 60x fewer failure and recover close to 150x faster.
It is imperative and important that the collaboration between all stakeholder right from the planning through development and delivery and automation of the delivery process. DevOps help in achieving these goals –
• Achieve faster time to market
• Lower failure rates of the new ad upcoming releases
• Shorten lead-time between the fixes
• Improve mean time to recovery and
• Most importantly, it helps improve deployment frequency with the help of Continuous -Integration, Delivery and Deployment.
To achieve DevOps Nirvana, you have to identify, where are you on DevOps continuum, DevOps Continuum is basically a helpful way to look at the different aspects of DevOps. The bottom horizontal axis represents what people perceive DevOps to fundamentally be focused on. Some folks adamantly feel that DevOps should focus on culture more than tools while other folks think that tools add value over culture.
My take is – irrespective of what tools you are using, DevOps is more like a mindset, so we should more focus on developing the DevOps culture.

The vertical axis depicts three levels of DevOps delivery chain – Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment.
You have to understand these concepts and then implement it in your project, product or organisation. According to a recent poll, participants indicated where their organisation fit on the continuum.
• 55% bottom left
• 26% bottom right
• 14% top left
• 5% top right
Now, you understand that DevOps is basically a blend of culture, tools and maturity that make sense for your organisation and what will make sense most likely evolve over time. The most important thing is to continually strive to break down the walls and bottlenecks between the phases of software delivery by improving collaboration and automation.

Happy Learning!!

Learning DevOps is Fun - I

Niloshima Srivastava — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 12:36:51 +0000

These days every one talk about DevOps and there is a lot of craziness going on and around this piece of technology.
WHAT IS DevOps?
Well, DevOps is everything but a technology, folks thought of DevOps as a part of technical stack, but it is nothing but a set of practices, philosophy and tools that increase the ability of any organization to deliver the products/applications or services in a high velocity and very efficiently.
DevOps is a by-product of people, process and products (tools which helps us) to enable continuous delivery to the end customer.
According to Sam Guckenheimer –
“The contraction of “Dev” and “Ops” refers to replacing siloed Development and Operations to create multidisciplinary teams that now work together with shared and efficient practices and tools.”

So, if I say in short DevOps is a blend of practices, processes and the tools that help us to enable efficiency, pace (high) and a valuable delivery to the end customers. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.
History of DevOps
If you want to understand DevOps, you should be aware that where did this DevOps come into the picture? Is it something really new or was already there?
DevOps is based on the concept and values of Agile Software Development, it is basically born out of the need to keep up the velocity of software increased and throughput agile methods have achieved. So, the advancement of Agile Philosophy or Culture, as well as Methods over the last few years, basically exposed the requirement for a more holistic approach to developing/deliver end-to-end software lifecycle.
DevOps is nothing but an IT mindset, incorporated with AGILE values which basically encourage communication, collaboration, integration and automation among the developer communities and IT operations in order to improve the velocity and the quality of delivering software.
There are still so many things left to explain, so you will be seeing a series of articles here, which will explain everything you need to know about #devops.
Some highlights which will be covered in this series will be –
• Challenges – that DevOps solves
• DevOps Goals
• DevOps Value
• DevOps Tools
• Phases of DevOps maturity
• How to achieve DevOps
• Last but not the least – What’s in it for you?
Please post your comments/suggestions so that this series can be more efficient and improved.

Happy Learning 😊

Points One Should Know About Azure DevOps

Niloshima Srivastava — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 14:30:26 +0000

Most of us have heard about Azure DevOps, but wonder whether to go for it or not, may be because your solutions are using technologies like Java, Angular or any open source technologies, in other words non-Microsoft technologies. So, if you have doubts whether to choose for your DevOps function between Azure, GCP or AWS, there is no need to get confused with “Azure” term in Azure DevOps, because Azure DevOps is fully functional and capable of handling your projects requirement.

What is Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps provides services to support teams to plan work, share/collaborate on code and to build and deploy the applications. It comes in two different flavours – a cloud-based services and a on-premises based servers. One major thing is to understand that we now have two segments/sections in Azure DevOps –

Azure DevOps Services, and
Azure DevOps Servers So what we have used as TFS – Team Foundation Servers is now known as Azure DevOps Servers, it is used for on-premises and what we have used and known as VSTS – Visual Studio Team Services is now Azure DevOps Services – this is nothing but the cloud for the same, where we can leverage the cloud services fully in Azure DevOps.

Azure DevOps doesn’t need Azure Subscription

Since Azure being part of Azure DevOps, we often get confused whether we need Azure Subscription or not, I would say that depends on your requirements. Because if you want to deploy your application on Azure, yes, you would need an Azure Subscription but Azure DevOps’ functionality can be leveraged without having an Azure subscription. So, in simple words – you don’t need to have an Azure subscription for getting/managing your projects with full capability with Azure DevOps. The reason for this is Azure DevOps provide you solutions for managing your project on-premises as well.

Language Barriers when working with Azure DevOps

It gets very confusing sometimes for a non-Microsoft developer/teams, whether to go with Azure DevOps or not because of the term Azure. Sometime we simply assume that it is native for Microsoft technology stack only. But the simple answer is No. there are no language or platform barriers for using/deploying/managing your (open source) project with Azure DevOps.
As Jamie Cool from Azure DevOps has already mentioned –
“Any language, any platform, any cloud”.
You just need to understand and leverage Azure DevOps’ in its full capabilities.
Azure DevOps works with AWS or GCP

It is a fair point to think whether Azure DevOps will work with AWS or GCP, so the answer to this is yes it will work with AWS or GCP as mentioned above – any language, any platform, any cloud.
But if you are on Azure, it will be fair to say that as a user you will get the complete and best user experience of Azure DevOps.
Not these clouds only, if you are using any other cloud for hosting services, you will be able utilize Azure DevOps in your projects.

Pricing/Cost of Azure DevOps

The details for pricing is available here.
As you can check in the link that Azure DevOps is free for team size (till) 5 so if you have a small team, you can go for Azure DevOps. You can start with trying and leveraging its capabilities for free and as and when your team grows you can choose to pay for the services you need.
When using Self-Hosting in Cloud, there is no additional charges in Team Foundation Server for running builds, this is included in the server license TFS 2017 and 2018 also includes one free concurrent job plus an additional job for each VS subscribers in the team. If you do wish to have more capacity, you can pay per parallel job.

Options available for Azure DevOps Deployment –

While working with DevOps using Azure, one has a lot of flexibility with deploying their solutions – we get three options – On-Premises Deployment, Self-Hosted in the Cloud and through a hosted Service in Azure. There are multiple agents used for the Deployment in each of the categories.
Azure DevOps Server was previously known as Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. The simplest wat to set up Azure DevOps is to place everything on a single server.
For Self-Hosting in the cloud, if you want to build and deploy Windows, Azure or other Visual Studio solution, you would need to have a Windows Agent, and these agents can also build your Java and Android apps. Basically, Self-Hosted CI/CD are for the customers who execute/run their own build/release servers. If you do not wish to run your own server, you can use Microsoft provided CI/CD.
You can start a free with downloading Azure DevOps Server. You can make use of the features like using the source control for uploading/sharing the code and keeping track of the progress via Scrum/Kanban boards, to perform build and release which are the part of DevOps CI/CD you can use Azure Pipelines.

Selection and choices from a very extensive set of tools when working with Azure DevOps

There is an extensive set of features provided in Azure DevOps from which you can probably use all or choose just what you need for your existing project’s workflow. Microsoft has provided the following features under its DevOps umbrella –
Azure Repos – Of course, TFS support is also there, along with this you are getting cloud hosted private GIT repos and you can collaborate/share it with your team.
Azure Boards – Boards like Scrum/Kanban are provided to fully leverage the Agile concepts in your projects and for keeping track of the progress.
Azure Pipeline – A complete CI/CD pipeline, to build test and deploy any language, any platform and any cloud.
Azure Test Plans – You can create Test Plans and share it with your team
Azure Artifacts – You can create/share packages with your team, like Maven/NuGet

Since a lot of organizations have also put their resources on some other DevOps tools, Microsoft has also provided support for the tools like –
• Jenkins
• Chef
• Terraform
• Ansible (Windows & Linux)
• VSTS

There are a lot many things to ponder upon with Azure DevOps, you just have to explore it hands-on to see what it can do for you.
Hoping that you’d learn something new from this read. Happy Learning!