Understanding DevOps and Cloud - High Level Overview

TheProf

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This is another post I've been meaning to create in the DevOps space for some time now... But being busy with work plus learning a bunch of new technology is definitely hindering my time. Now that work has slowed down a bit, I have a bit more time.


Cloud:

The most important part to understand first, is that we're in an era where the public cloud has allowed us to experiment with many new services simply because the cloud has everything already deployed as a managed service, this means that customers can literally test new functionality at a fraction of a cost compared to the traditional infrastructure where you'd have to build and deploy everything yourself. And this allows for a more quicker adoption of new technology.


Containers:

For example, lets say I wanted to test some cloud native apps and some scaling functionality. How can I do that? Well I can easily package my app in a container and run that container in the cloud using some type of an orchestrator platform. In the case of AWS, we have EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) and ECS (Elastic Container Service) which we can leverage for our containers. If you need/want Kuberentes, then go with EKS, if you don't really care about Kuberenetes, you also have the option of ECS.

Why would I run my workload as containers? Containers are a lot more portable because they are much smaller in size when compared to VMs, it is quite easy to scale a container cluster, and because the costs of running containers are more cost effective than using virtual machines since containers use less resources. There are a few other points to mention, in that containers allows us to use different technology stacks for different microservices. A microservices oriented architecture splits up a lot of the services that make up a single monolithic app into smaller parts and allows us to use different programming languages to build out these individual microservices, this means that you can have a team dedicate to microservice A and a team dedicated to microservice B and use completely different programming languages, why? because each programming language is suited to solve different problems. You cant use Python for every project for example, but it does have it's use cases.

This also means that you need to have a team with expertise to manage these containers, so there are tradeoffs that each organisation has to look at and make the decision that is best for them.


Infrastructure As Code:

IaC is a big part of deploying and managing resources in the cloud. With the traditional approach, where most tasks are deployed manually, this does not translate well into the Cloud era, where the cloud is predominantly API based and every communication between services is API based. With IaC tools like Terraform, we can take advantage of the API based nature of cloud and deploy/manage our resources through code.

An IaC tool is basically a tool used for creating configuration files or scripts that you can then use to automate the deployment of resources in the cloud. We can then share the code with other team members and in these scripts also serve kind of like documentation where you can look and see what is deployed. IaC tools will also write code in a declarative fashion, as in you define the desired state and the tool will figure out how to deploy the infrastructure, compared to imperative tools that have you define every single step in a more more granular way. You could argue that imperative is better due to the nature of having to describe everything yourself vs having an IaC tool handle that for you, but this also means that you need to be very well versed in that language otherwise it is hard to learn.

On of the advantages of an IaC tool is that it should be easy to read the scripts and easy to pick up due to the declarative nature of the tool.


Configuration Management tools:

CM tools are quite popular as well, and they serve a different function than an IaC tool does. CM tools are used for configuring applications and operating systems vs deploying the infrastructure like the IaC tools. Of course, there is some overlap between the two. You can also use IaC with CM tools to create you deployment pipeline. An example of a CM tool would be something like Ansible from Red Hat.


Bash and PowerShell:

If you work with Operating Systems, like Linux and Windows, chances are you've seen some bash script and some powershell scripts. In the world of DevOps, you will be doing a lot of scripting with different scripting languages, it all depends on what OS you're using and your needs. From my experience, knowing at least one scripting language like Bash or PowerShell is important. I've spent many years in the Windows world so PowerShell to me is not new, but Bash is, so it is important to identify at least one scripting language that you can become good at.

With these scripting languages, we can do a lot automation of the operating systems and deploying apps on these operating systems.


Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment / Delivery. (CI/CD):

CI/CD is another concept that is important to understand. In DevOps, the way you deploy something, you usually have a pipeline / workflow you follow. The goal of CI/CD is to help with the deployment of new features in an automated fashion so that you can continuously introduce new features to an application.

If you think about cloud services today, you never hear about a service going down due to engineers needing to add new features. Sure services do go down from time to time, but it usually when someone makes a mistake. But in reality, a service should never be down in order to add new features.


Orchestrators:

Orchestrators are one of the core elements of Cloud Native Apps. When deploying containers, you have to make a choice as to how you want to manage and orchestrate these containers. Orchestrators essentially manage the life cycle of a cluster that run containers. An exmaple of orchestrators, would something like Kubernetes, Nomad, Docker Swarm.


Versioning Control System (VCS):

VCS is a big part of the DevOps space, VCS is where you store all your configuration files that other members of the team can access. This is important in areas where you want to collaborate on projects with multiple engineers. You need a central store where everyone has access.


Documentation:

Very important to keep documentation up to date. You always have to document your code which is typically done within the VCS and sometimes in the script itself.


Measure everything:

One of the ways in which you can gauge the impact you're having on the infrastructure is to look at where you can improve process, deployment speeds, etc is by measuring how your services are deployed, looking at various metrics to see where you can improve, this is an iterative process so it this will always be part of the deployment/management of services.
 


We do this for our build pipeline, I myself am not a developer really. But many on my team are.

We store code in github, when it's ready to build it goes to Azure SaaS and PaaS containers...
then gets passed into our - gcc, c-lang, Java-Maven, VMs, gets packaged as RPMs for 3 or 4 different OS's
(different flavors of Linux) and automatically gets uploaded to our yum repo server.

Basically on demand, all at the push of a button, anytime any code gets updated.
Yes you could do a lot of this at your house, but try doing if with 5 or 6 other people.
Also, our code is immediately available for download on the web.. (if you're a paying customer ).
 
Cloud computing storage use a lot today. My current work connecting with mssql gui tool. I have same device on work. Such tool allows you to navigate easily through data and perform full-text searches to create filtered tables and views.
 
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how do I start learning devOps

DevOps is not for beginners, you need to have an understadning of how a lot of different services work. A good base would require you to know an operating well like Linux for example, automation tools like ansible, terraform, in some cases a programming language like Python, orchestration and containerization tools, Git, etc... There's a lot of tech to know.

If you are already working in IT, just look and see what skills you're missing and focus on that. In my case, I was missing Linux knowledge and spent about a year ramping up and getting comfortable, everyone is different.
 
DevOps is not for beginners, you need to have an understadning of how a lot of different services work. A good base would require you to know an operating well like Linux for example, automation tools like ansible, terraform, in some cases a programming language like Python, orchestration and containerization tools, Git, etc... There's a lot of tech to know.

If you are already working in IT, just look and see what skills you're missing and focus on that. In my case, I was missing Linux knowledge and spent about a year ramping up and getting comfortable, everyone is different.
so how can i get started with linux
 

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