With all of the emerging technology solutions and paradigms emerging in the IT space, it can be difficult to get a full understanding of everything; particularly before developing biases. So… from the perspective of an infosec and ops guy I will list out some notes on my own review of current direction of devops. This review is based primarily on Udacity – Intro to DevOps and assorted blogs.
Why do it?
Reduce wastage in software development and operation workflows. Simply, more value, less pain.
What is is?
Most of the definitions out there boil down to communication and collaboration between Developers, QA and IT Ops throughout all stages of the development lifecycle.
- No more passing the release from Dev to IT Ops
- No more clear boundaries between Dev and IT Ops people/environments/processes and tools
- No more inconsistency between Dev and Prod environments
- No more deciding who’s problem bugs are
- No more 7 day release deployments
- No more separate tool sets
Agile development + Continuous Monitoring + Delivery + Automation + Feedback loops = DevOps?
- Create shared view on goals, responsibilities, priorities and benefits
- Learn from failures (feedback mechanisms include devs and operators)
- Reduce risk and size of changes
- Drive automation
- Drive feedback loops
- Validate ideas as quickly and cheaply (cost + risk) as possible
What DevOps is not:
- Developers overtaking operations
- Just tools (though it really is enabled and perhaps dependent on tools)
How do you apply it?
CAMS – Culture, Automation, Measurement and Sharing
- Culture -> Agile like (People>Process>Tools) + Lean (don’t do what’s not valuable)
- Automation -> Deployment, Unit Testing, CI -> These come together with DevOps?
- Measurement -> Infrastructure, usage, release, performance, business metrics, processes, trends
- Sharing -> Without the functional separation, feedback loops are tighter; particularly between code and operate
What technologies enable it?
Coming in next lesson – good resource for tools – stackshare.io
Other thoughts
Not much so far – looking forward to testing some tools. Particularly how patching and vulnerability management can be applied to docker images.