Introduction to DevOps and the top 10 tools used in DevOps Methodology.

The word DevOps is a combination of the terms development and operations, meant to represent a collaborative or shared approach to the tasks performed by a company's application development and IT operations teams.

In its broadest meaning, DevOps is a philosophy that promotes better communication and collaboration between these teams and others in an organization. In its most narrow interpretation, DevOps describes the adoption of iterative software development, automation and programmable infrastructure deployment and maintenance.
The term DevOps also covers culture changes, such as building trust and cohesion between developers and systems administrators and aligning technological projects to business requirements. DevOps can change the software delivery chain, services, job roles, IT tools and best practices.

While DevOps is not a technology, DevOps environments generally have common methodologies.

These include the following:

1). Continuous integration and continuous delivery or continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools, with an emphasis on task automation;
2). Products that support DevOps adoption, including real-time monitoring and incident management systems, configuration management and collaboration platforms; and
cloud computing, microservices and containers implemented concurrently with DevOps methodologies.

3). A DevOps approach is one of many techniques used to execute IT projects that meet business needs. DevOps can coexist with Agile software development; IT service management frameworks, such as ITIL; project management directives, such as Lean and Six Sigma; and other strategies.

Benefits of DevOps:

a). DevOps takes down the traditional departmental style in which a certain team is assigned to each mission, and it used to be siloed, in effect. This, in turn, has reduced versatility and reactivity. DevOps encouraged cooperation and collaboration beyond the lines of an organizational hierarchy

b). When companies implement DevOps with fault detection techniques, it contributes to dramatically reducing failures. DevOps is commonly implemented on top of the Agile model; it facilitates teamwork, modular programming, etc., making it easy to identify faults

c). Organizations would become more performance-based than power-based with DevOps. This makes the workforce more innovative and productive and decreases attrition, and increases retention

d). In DevOps, teams develop a culture of confidence and teamwork that supports them by constantly working on creativity and innovation to enhance organizational products and services. Such initiatives allow businesses to understand better and address their consumer needs

Below are the most common top 10 tools used in DevOps Methodology.

1). ELK Stack:

ELK is known as Elastic Search, Logstash, and Kibana, three powerful open-source tools mainly used in Continuous Monitoring

2). Ansible:

Ansible is an open-source platform that offers one of the easiest ways to automate the IT infrastructure and applications, such as network setup, cloud deployment, and development environment design

3). Chef:

Chef is a powerful automation tool for configuration management that allows you to convert infrastructure into code

4). Docker:

A lightweight tool that uses containers to bundle an application before shipping the entire container as one package with all the specifications and dependencies

5. Jenkins:

Jenkins is a Java-written continuous integration server. You can use it in near real-time for testing and monitoring changes. As a developer, this will help you easily identify and fix bugs in your code and automate their development testing

6). Splunk:

Splunk is a software platform for searching, analyzing, and visualizing machine-generated data or logs collected from websites, apps, sensors, computers, etc., that make up the IT and business infrastructure

7). Nagios:

Nagios allows you and your organization to recognize and solve IT infrastructure problems before they affect key business processes

8). Puppet:

Using an open-source configuration management framework to simplify the way your software is inspected, distributed, and managed over the entire life cycle with device independence

9). Git:

GIT is a version control system that allows you to monitor changes to your file and easily organize your teams work by using it

Selenium:

Selenium for web applications is a compact software testing platform. It gives you a simple interface for the creation of automated tests.
Next in this DevOps tutorial post lets look at a few case studies.

Real-time Use-Cases of DevOps by NASA:

Problem Statement: For greater agility and cost savings, NASA had to shift almost 65 applications from a conventional hardware-based data center to a cloud-based environment. Managing multiple virtual private clouds (VPCs), AWS accounts were Burdensome.

Solution: By using Ansible Tower to control and schedule the cloud climate, this issue was solved.

Impact: Stacking applications from 1-2 hours to less than 10 minutes per stack.
Real-time disk and RAM monitoring was achieved.
The time required to update nasa.gov has been reduced from 1 hour to 5 minutes.

I hope you enjoyed and learnt something new, please feel free to like and leave a comment or feed back in the comment section below.

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