Python being a highly accessible language makes scripting and automation in DevOps easier. It allows professionals to build, test, visualize, deploy, and monitor the DevOps lifecycle.
For a DevOps developer, Python is a beneficial tool to have as it offers various helpful use cases across significant stages of the DevOps process.
Check this DevOps tutorial for Beginners!
What is DevOps?
DevOps consists of two words; “development” and “operations”. DevOps is not any technology, process, and neither standard. Some people refer to DevOps as a “Culture”.
DevOps can be defined as a combination of several tools, practices, and cultural philosophies that help in improving any organization’s ability to provide better services to its customers in a more efficient manner. It also helps to update and improve the already existing products much quicker than the traditional software development process used by the companies.
This velocity in work provides organizations with a better way to provide great services to their customers and stay ahead of the competition in a highly competitive market.Let’s see what is python in this informative blog on Python for DevOps.
What is Python?
Python is a popular high-level, object-oriented, interactive language that is dynamically typed. Python was created in 1985-1990 by Guido van Rossum.
When compared with other programming languages Python is considered much simpler which encourages developers to make great applications with less exertion. Python code is interpreted line-by-line which makes it more effective and easier to troubleshoot bugs.
Importance of Python in DevOps
Let’s talk about a few important reasons why Python is important for DevOps:
- Python is considered one of the finest scripting languages. It provides great library support that allows writing scripts that can easily build communication within system internals, can manipulate files and strings and can manage networks, etc.
- To create custom utilities, and web applications for data visualization, python is used by many DevOps developers. Because, with python, they can build utilities in a few days rather than investing months.
- All Linux systems nowadays come bundled with python.
- Ansible is completely written in python. For automating your tasks you can easily develop ansible modules. Also, not just Ansible, but every tool that is programmed using python allows for the creation of custom scripts to work better with them.
- Even during DevOps interview rounds, you might be asked to solve scripting or programming problems during the initial stage of the interview. Knowledge of Python can be beneficial to clear those interview questions.
Benefits of Python in DevOps
Efficiency
When it comes to Python as a programming language and DevOps as a technique, efficiency is guaranteed. The complete coding process is amazingly efficient as code can be written using best practices, processes, and patterns.
Agile Programming for DevOps
The syntax used in Python is pretty simple and easy to memorize which results in better productivity among developers. It is used for scripting automation and web deployment in DevOps.
Simplified
Python’s simple syntax and huge resources make scripting, automation, and programming easier. It assists organizations in adapting to change, automating deployment and development, and dealing with difficult problems. It is a language that both inexperienced and seasoned developers can use.
Adaptable
Python in the DevOps culture aids in the development of scalable, adaptable, and flexible applications through efficient and effective methods. Organizations must be ready to adopt and adapt to change.
Great combination
DevOps and Python are not at the end of the road, but have many more years ahead of them in terms of building apps, automating processes, increasing productivity, efficiency, and quality, and meeting ever-changing customer expectations.
In next section, let’s explore how to use Python for Devops.
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How to use Python in DevOps?
As we know, automation is the main goal of DevOps, and that’s where Python comes into play. It gets easier while writing scripts that can automate tasks in the DevOps process with the help of Python. Let’s discuss some of these tasks in detail:
Monitoring
There are certain situations where an alert is needed to be sent by the system in case something happens wrong or anything malfunctions, with the help of python you can simply create scripts that can be used for automation of day-to-day monitoring tasks and can even generate and send you a notification in case of any issue in the system.
You can implement python libraries such as psutils, which is a cross-platform library developed by the python community for process and system monitoring.
Deployment
The deployment of applications can also be scripted with the help of Python. Moreover, it can help to deploy, configure, and manage the applications right from the development stage to testing and production environments. Cuisine and Fabric are the famous modules offered by python that are used by DevOps for deployment.
CI/CD and Configuration Management Pipelines
Python is also used for continuous integration and deployment automation. The automation of the CI/CD pipeline is simplified and made error-free with the use of Python, as it makes the scripting much easier for automation.
Cloud Automation
Python can also be used for writing infrastructure-specific scripting that can be used for the creation, configuration and to manage the DevOps apps in the cloud platforms. Python SDK modules for AWS and Google Cloud Platform are Boto and google-cloud-storage respectively. Apache Libcloud is another example of generic libraries used widely by DevOps vendors and infrastructure teams for manipulating infrastructure easily and confidently.
Python is a highly platform-independent programming language that can seamlessly run across multiple development, testing, and production environments.
There are different DevOps tools used in each stage of the DevOps process, tools like Git, Docker, Jenkins, and Kubernetes are among a few of those.
Knowledge of Python makes it fairly easy when working with such tools, also as we discussed above Ansible is built on python. You can easily customize and implement it according to your requirement. Also, tools like Docker Compose, Ambassador API Gateway, and Apache Libcloud are some of the useful cloud-native tools used in DevOps which are also developed in Python.
Command-line interfaces (CLIs ) of AWS and Google Cloud are also built using Python making Python a highly versatile language in DevOps.
Conclusion
Today we learned how scripting and programming knowledge is important for DevOps developers, and also why Python is one of the best languages that can be used in DevOps for writing various scripts which makes the automation process fairly simple.
Also, we learnt that every Linux framework is packaged with python by default. There are many tools written in Python that are used in DevOps, and if you have python knowledge it becomes easy for you to customize their contents and design them according to your requirements.