This first chapter will provide some background knowledge of DevOps practices, processes, and tools. We will understand modern DevOps and how it differs from traditional DevOps. We will also introduce containers and understand in detail how containers within the cloud change the entire IT landscape so that we can build on this book’s base. While this book does not entirely focus on containers and their orchestration, modern DevOps practices heavily emphasize it.
In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:
- What is DevOps?
- Introduction to cloud computing
- Understanding modern cloud-native applications
- Modern DevOps versus traditional DevOps
- The need for containers
- Container architecture
- Containers and modern DevOps practices
- Migrating to containers from virtual machines
By the end of this chapter, you should understand the following key aspects:
- What DevOps is and what role it plays in the modern IT landscape
- What cloud computing is and how it has changed IT services
- What a modern cloud-native application looks like and how it has changed DevOps
- Why we need containers and what problems they solve
- The container architecture and how it works
- How containers contribute to modern DevOps practices
- The high-level steps of moving from a virtual machine-based architecture to containers
What is DevOps?
As you know, software development and operations were traditionally handled by separate teams with distinct roles and responsibilities. Developers focused on writing code and creating new features, while operations teams focused on deploying and managing the software in production environments. This separation often led to communication gaps, slow release cycles, and inefficient processes.
DevOps bridges the gap between development and operations by promoting a culture of collaboration, shared responsibilities, and continuous feedback using automation throughout the software development life cycle.
It is a set of principles and practices, as well as a philosophy, that encourage the participation of the development and operations teams in the entire software development life cycle, including software maintenance and operations. To implement this, organizations manage several processes and tools that help automate the software delivery process to improve speed and agility, reduce the cycle time of code release through continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and monitor the applications running in production.
A DevOps team should ensure that instead of having a clear set of siloed groups that do development, operations, and QA, they have a single team that takes care of the entire SDLC life cycle – that is, the team will build, deploy, and monitor the software. The combined team owns the whole application instead of certain functions. That does not mean that people don’t have specialties, but the idea is to ensure that developers know something about operations and that operations engineers know something about development. The QA team works hand in hand with developers and operations engineers to understand the business requirements and various issues faced in the field. Based on these learnings, they need to ensure that the product they are developing meets business requirements and addresses problems encountered in the field.
In a traditional development team, the source of the backlog is the business and its architects. However, for a DevOps team, there are two sources of their daily backlog – the business and its architects and the customers and issues that they face while they’re operating their application in production. Therefore, instead of following a linear path of software delivery, DevOps practices generally follow an infinity loop, as shown in the following figure:
Figure 1.1 – DevOps infinity loop
To ensure smooth interoperability between people of different skill sets, DevOps focuses heavily on automation and tools. DevOps aims to ensure that we try to automate repeatable tasks as much as possible and focus on more important things. This ensures product quality and speedy delivery. DevOps focuses on people, processes, and tools, giving the most importance to people and the least to tools. We generally use tools to automate processes that help people achieve the right goals.
