Although DevOps engineers act as different roles in companies, almost all of them touch on two things every day – automation and continuous integration.
Automation:
Most of the tasks associated with maintaining the infrastructure are still manual. Companies prefer to use traditional validated methods rather than automate processes because they don’t want to take any risks. But the fact is that automated tasks will help to develop and deploy software more quickly, which means that companies can accelerate the speed of making profits from customers.
To clarify this point, we can consider the following situation. If the system engineer manually backs up all services twice a day as required, he can complete this work by writing scripts on the cloud facilities instead of wasting time to repeat manual operation. By automating the backup process, system engineers can save time to focus more on important things, such as troubleshooting services that need to be shut down because of virtual machine problems. Repeating the same manual operation will cause your system engineers to be overburdened, and their efficiency will be greatly reduced. This is just a very simple example to illustrate the concept of resource waste by not implementing automation.
DevOps can be used as an extension of agile principles, because it can reduce the risk that may occur due to non-collaboration among developers, QA and operation and maintenance teams. DevOps broadens the scope of agile principles by recognizing that high-quality software development requires continuous participation and feedback from all stakeholders, including quality assurance party and operational experts.
There are many things that can be done automatically, such as updating the Apache Web server when new patches are released, and updating the version of open-source software deployed on the server.
DevOps engineers can create script environments to complete the automatic configuration of servers. You can run the script on one node, but it would be impractical to run the same script manually on thousands or hundreds of nodes. Scripts are no longer an extensible solution here.
Therefore, software configuration, configuration management, and application deployment need to be automated across a large number of nodes in a scalable manner. This is where configuration management tools (such as Chef, Puppet and Ansible) come into play in the DevOps world
Continuous Integration:
Another important aspect of DevOps[spoto ccna] is to implement continuous integration (CI) in software development practice. CI allows developers to constantly update the resource base used for automated build and test.
The continuous integration system usually includes a tool that can continuously monitor the version control system. Whenever changes to the version control system are detected, the system automatically builds and tests your application. If the build or test fails, the system will immediately notify the developer to solve the problem.
Continuous integration ensures continuous delivery, as all code changes are continuously deployed to test and production environments after the build phase.
Through continuous integration, developers can get rid of human tasks and improve work efficiency. Because construction tasks are now completed in CI in an automated manner, and errors and bugs are easier to find and solve due to more frequent testing, end users can update faster and more frequently.
There are different products and tools that can help you achieve continuous integration in your organization. There are tools that allow you to host CI servers in your own network infrastructure. The most popular tool was Jenkins renamed from Sun’s Hudson project.
There are also some other CI products, such as Circle CI and Travis CI, which are completely hosted in the cloud. These managed CI products are increasingly popular with small organizations because they enable engineering teams to start continuous integration as soon as possible.
Summary
The most important role played by DevOps engineers is to bridge the gap between software development teams and operation teams and improve the speed of software delivery. Although DevOps engineers play different roles in the organization, they always contact two things: automation and continuous integration.
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