Overview of Beginner's DevOps Course

Aug 25, 2024

Beginner's DevOps Course Overview

Instructor Information

  • Taught by the CEO and co-founder of LayerCI.

Course Goals

  • To teach fundamental DevOps concepts to regular developers and engineering practitioners.
  • To prepare participants for a DevOps engineering role.

What is DevOps?

  • A methodology that enhances product development through continuous integration of user feedback.
  • Departs from traditional software development approaches (e.g., factory-like development).
  • Emphasizes continuous updates and user feedback integration (e.g., Facebook vs. old games).

Key Stages of DevOps

  1. Planning

    • Identify features to build and work on specifications.
  2. Coding

    • Developers build features based on specifications.
  3. Building

    • Source code is bundled into runnable artifacts (e.g., JavaScript for web).
  4. Testing

    • Involves both automated (Continuous Integration) and manual (Quality Assurance) testing.
  5. Releasing

    • Continuous deployment strategies for automatic release of confirmed changes.
  6. Operating

    • Scaling, resource allocation, and performance monitoring (e.g., handling architectural problems).
  7. Feedback

    • User feedback is integrated back into the planning phase for continuous improvement.

DevOps Engineering

Definition

  • Focuses on the technical aspects of DevOps.
  • Job postings often seek engineers for tasks like building, testing, deploying, and monitoring.

Three Pillars of DevOps Engineering

  1. Pull Request Automation

    • Facilitates rapid feedback on code changes.
    • Supports atomic changes through pull requests reviewed for quality and compliance.
  2. Deployment Automation

    • Ensures efficient and reliable code releases without user complaints.
    • Involves practices like canary deployments (testing features on a small user group).
  3. Application Performance Management

    • Focuses on monitoring application health and performance.
    • Involves logging, metrics, and automatic alerts to detect issues.

Pull Request Automation

  • Developers propose changes via pull requests to facilitate collaboration and feedback.
  • Automation tools help to quickly identify issues (e.g., typo gates).
  • Code reviews are critical for ensuring quality and compliance with specifications.

Testing in DevOps

Test Driven Development (TDD)

  • Developers write tests before coding to clarify expectations and ensure features work as intended.

Continuous Integration (CI)

  • Developers continuously push small changes to a central repository, verified by automated tests.
  • CI is crucial for maintaining code quality and speeding up development cycles.

Deployment Strategies

Rolling Deployments

  • Gradually replaces old versions of applications with new ones, ensuring no downtime.
  • Effective for maintaining API compatibility and reverting changes if issues arise.

Blue-Green Deployments

  • Maintains two identical environments (blue and green) for seamless switching between old and new versions.
  • Allows testing and validation of the new version before directing traffic to it.

Canary Deployments

  • Gradual feature rollouts to a small percentage of users to gauge impact before full deployment.

Application Performance Management

Log Aggregation

  • Collects logs from various services for troubleshooting and performance monitoring.
  • Tools like ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) facilitate effective log analysis.

Metrics Monitoring

  • Uses numerical data to assess application health and performance (e.g., CPU usage, request fulfillment times).
  • Tools like Prometheus and Grafana are commonly used for metrics collection and visualization.

Conclusion

  • Emphasizes the importance of DevOps engineering, automation, and performance management for successful software development in modern engineering environments.