DevOps… DevOps… DevOps…!!!
The IT industry loves DevOps & I can’t avoid writing about it.
Definitely, DevOps Engineers are in-trend! As fancy as it sounds, DevOps is not some tool or a mere technology solution. But, DevOps is a work culture. And, DevOps Engineers follow this culture to drive a faster, consistent & secure software delivery towards the consumable market & to the end-user. Many top companies & even startups are following this work culture of DevOps for reducing the total time duration it takes to bring a product from conception to market availability. This indicates a great job market for a DevOps Engineer & their expertise.
Get to the point? “Dev” stands for “development” & “Ops” stands for “operations”. And, DevOps is the combination of best practices & tools designed to accelerate an organization’s performance ability to deliver applications & services. Much faster than the traditional software development processes.
According to Glassdoor’s 50 Best Jobs in America rankings, the DevOps Engineer job leads with rank #2. Also, this role of DevOps Engineer witnessed a 225% jump in postings on Indeed(according to a Software Development Times report).
DevOps Engineers follow a lifecycle with the continuous automation of operations & other stages that needs some tools for the sake of deployment as well. Primarily, the DevOps lifecycle has three types of environments for an idea/plan to convert into a Product.
- Development
- Staging or Testing
- Deployment or Production
Well in-specific, a product in a DevOps cycle is obtained from surpassing various stages like –
- Development
This is the beginning step where the objectives of the application/end-product are in main focus for the implementation of the project idea. Here, the objectives of the application are met by means of coding the features of the application. This code generation happens in a continuous development manner followed by continuous monitoring & feedback.
- Integration
The planning of tests on the developed code is done in this step. Here, the integration means the merging of the changes in code into a central repository after which the code is sent to automation and testing. The main goal is to plan tests, understand the code & build the product.
- Testing
DevOps routine must ensure if the product works as it should. For that, a tester needs both a testing and staging environment. Here, the testing environment makes sure that every component does its job meanwhile the staging environment ensures that your software behaves correctly in an environment almost exactly the same as production.
- Monitoring
This stage is followed after testing to oversee the entire development process from planning, development, integration & testing, for further deployment, and operations. Monitoring involves complete & real-time view of the status of applications / services / infrastructure in the production environment.
- Feedback
This phase of DevOps lifecycle links to the customers/end users. The main focus is on amplifying and shortening the feedback loops. With the relevant & fast feedback process, improvizations such as new features of the application can be added to development environment without affecting the good old features.
- Deployment
Continuous deployment is a needed to update your code on the servers where the servers can range from one to thousands. This stage enables you to deploy your software to testing & production environments with just a push of a button.
- Operations
Remember the feedback phase for building an efficient product/app with customers’ input? Here, Operations phase boosts up the feedback to improve the code & result in getting a better product. Operations teams primarily focus on empowering other teams through collaboration & self-service.
Key Tools for DevOps Engineers to configuring the DevOps life cycle!
Since DevOps is more about organizational change, with dynamic processes & workflows. There is no comprehensive set of tools for DevOps Engineers, however, there are some most common yet right tools for enabling the software development process & DevOps culture. So, being a master of these tools can be counted as a relevant skill set for DevOps.
#1 Versions Control Tools
The practice of tracking & managing the changes to software code is ‘Version control’. This is also known as ‘Source Control’. Some common version control tools are Git, GitLab, and Bitbucket.
#2 Build Tools
These build tools are actually the programs that automate the process of building an executable application from source code. This process of building includes activities such as compiling, linking, & packaging the code into an executable form. Jenkins & GitLab CI/CD are some popular tools that one uses for all of the continuous methods (Continuous Integration, Delivery, & Deployment).
#3 Container Tools
These days IT teams are able to launch, update & deploy apps and services much easier with the help of containers. These tools help fix the scalability issues in an application & also execute a multi-cloud approach for business needs. Kubernetes, Docker & AWS ECS/EKS are pretty famous for dominating the world of container tools.
#4 Testing Tools
A lot of testing frameworks & open source tools are available for DevOps. But, Selenium, JUnit, and Jenkins are some of the top testing tools for continuous testing. These tools help save time and automate the entire testing & staging process.
There are other advanced level tools for DevOps in the market and are to be chosen to regulate the application’s size, reliability & performance.
Wait! There’s more before you even start to get your hands dirty with these tools!
Some prerequisite & must-have skills for any aspirant to proceed for DevOps Engineer Job role
- Linux and cloud computing (any cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, OpenStack, etc)
- Troubleshooting skills & techniques
With a heavy adoption of the DevOps culture in the IT & Software world, the job opportunities are enormous for aspirants. Groom yourself into a Professional DevOps Engineer with ZEN Class-DevOps Career Program assuring 100% Job Placement Support. Get industry-ready by covering all the practical aspects of the tools & technology relevant to this trending domain.
