DevOps Tutorial - A Step-by-Step Tutorial for Beginners

Overview of DevOps

A study by Grand View Research says that the DevOps market size across the globe is estimated to reach US$12.85 billion by 2025. According to a report from SD Times, ‘Indeed’s job postings show that the role of a DevOps Engineer has seen a 225 percent jump. DevOps Engineer is at the second position on Glassdoor’s rankings for the 50 best jobs in America. Glassdoor says that the average annual salary of a DevOps Engineer ranges from US$135,000 to US$180,000.

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Reportlinker also predicts that the DevOps market size will grow up to US$10.3 billion by 2023, at a compound annual rise rate of 24.70 percent during the forecast period. Being in the technology field, you must be aware of this buzzword, DevOps, taking up the IT world by storm. This tutorial will take you through the main concepts of DevOps, along with its important tools and use cases.

Introduction to DevOps

DevOps is more than just a set of tools or practices. It’s an organizational change that focuses on collaboration, automation, and continuous delivery. It breaks down the divisions that generally separate development and operations teams, encouraging shared responsibility for the entire software lifecycle.

Now, how exactly is this achieved? We will discuss this as we move further.

Need of DevOps

Imagine a scenario where the software development team puts in a lot of effort to make cool apps. But when it’s time to launch, the operations team faces problems. This causes delays, and errors, and messes up the smooth flow from making the app to launching. This division may restrict progress and hinder a company’s ability to stay competitive in the market.

Why DevOps? Why not other methods?

DevOps addresses these challenges by encouraging collaboration, communication, and integration between development and operations teams. It aims to break down the barriers that traditionally exist between these two separate entities. By promoting a cultural shift and utilizing cutting-edge tools and practices, DevOps works to achieve critical objectives, such as speeding up delivery, enhancing reliability, and encouraging innovation.

Moving to the next section in this DevOps tutorial, let’s check out the major differences between Agile and DevOps.

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Differences Between Agile and DevOps

How exactly does DevOps work?

Let’s move to the next section in this DevOps tutorial and check out the DevOps life cycle. This way, we can understand how DevOps works.

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DevOps LifeCycle

DevOps focuses on bringing all the development, operations, and IT infrastructure guys, including developers, testers, system admins, and QAs, under one roof. Hence, all these people together are called DevOps engineers.

DevOps engineers share the end-to-end responsibility of gathering information, setting up the infrastructure, developing, testing, deploying, continuously monitoring, and fetching feedback from end-users.

You can figure it all out from the DevOps diagram illustrated below:

• Code: The first step in the DevOps life cycle is coding, where developers build the code on any platform
• Build: Developers build the version of their program in any extension depending upon the language they are using it.
• Test: For DevOps to be successful, the testing process must be automated using any DevOps automation tool like Selenium
• Release: A process for managing, planning, scheduling, and controlling the build in different environments after testing and before deployment
• Deploy: This phase gets all artifacts/code files of the application ready and deploys/executes them on the server
• Operate: The application is run after its deployment, where clients use it in real-world scenarios.
• Monitor: This phase helps in providing crucial information that helps ensure service uptime and optimal performance
• Plan: The planning stage gathers information from the monitoring stage and, as per feedback, implements the changes for better performance

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Now, let’s discuss the different stages in the DevOps life cycle that contribute to the consistent software development life cycle (SDLC):

• Continuous Development
• Continuous Integration
• Continuous Testing
• Continuous Monitoring
• Virtualization and Containerization

These stages are basically the aspects of achieving the DevOps goal.

Now, let’s discuss each of them in detail.

Continuous Development

In the Waterfall model, our software product gets broken into multiple pieces or sub-parts to make the development cycles shorter, but in this stage of DevOps, the software is getting developed continuously.

• Tools used: As we code and build in this stage, we can use GIT to maintain different versions of the code. To build/package the code into an executable file, we can use a reliable tool, namely, Maven.

Continuous Integration

In this stage, if our code is supporting new functionality, it is integrated with the existing code continuously. As the continuous development keeps on, the existing code needs to be integrated with the latest one ‘continuously,’ and the changed code should ensure that there are no errors in the current environment for it to work smoothly.

• Tools used: Jenkins is the tool that is used for continuous integration. Here, we can pull the latest code from the GIT repository, which we can produce the build and deploy it on the test or the production server.

Continuous Testing

In the continuous testing stage, our developed software is getting tested continuously to detect bugs using several automation tools.

• Tools used: For QA/Testing purposes, we can use many automated tools, and the tool used widely for automation testing is Selenium as it lets QAs test the codes in parallel to ensure that there are no errors, incompetencies, or flaws in the software.

Continuous Monitoring

It is a very crucial part of the DevOps life cycle where it provides important information that helps us ensure service uptime and optimal performance. The operations team gets results from reliable monitoring tools to detect and fix the bugs/flaws in the application.

• Tools used: Several tools such as Nagios, Splunk, ELK Stack, and Sensu are used for monitoring the application. They help us monitor our applications and servers closely to check their health and whether they are operating actively. Any major issue detected by these tools is forwarded to the development team to fix in the continuous development phase.

Let’s now talk about some of the major DevOps tools in the next section of this DevOps tutorial.

DevOps Tools

The most popular DevOps tools are discussed below.

• Puppet: Puppet is one of the widely-used DevOps tools. It allows delivering and releasing technology changes quickly and frequently. It has features of versioning, automated testing, and continuous delivery.
• Docker: Docker is a high-end DevOps tool that allows building, shipping, and running distributed applications on multiple systems. It helps assemble the applications quickly and is typically suitable for container management.
• Jenkins: Jenkins is one of the most popular DevOps tools that allow monitoring of the execution of repeated jobs. Apart from this, Jenkins lets us integrate the changes and access the results easily and quickly.
• Ansible: This tool helps automate the entire life cycle of an application, and manages complicated deployments, and enhances productivity.
• Nagios: This DevOps tool helps monitor the IT infrastructure. It is capable of determining errors and rectifying them with the help of the standard network, server, and log monitoring systems.

After being successfully implemented in SDLC, now DevOps is considered the key to speeding up various cloud platforms. Its all-rounder performance has attracted aspirants to build a career in this domain, and hence having sound knowledge is imperative for them.

DevOps is a contemporary approach that lets companies utilize numerous benefits. Some of the major DevOps benefits and limitations are as follows:

Advantages of DevOps

• Faster Delivery: DevOps practices enable fast deployment, reducing time-to-market for software.
• Improved Collaboration: DevOps encourages better communication and collaboration among development, operations, and other teams.
• Continuous Integration and Deployment: CI/CD pipelines enable effortless code integration, testing, and deployment, ensuring a continuous delivery cycle.
• Enhanced Quality and Stability: DevOps emphasizes automated testing, leading to higher software quality and more stable releases.
• Scalability and Flexibility: DevOps facilitates scalability and flexibility, allowing systems to adapt and grow with evolving requirements.

Disadvantages of DevOps

• Complexity: Implementing DevOps methodologies can be complex, requiring comprehensive understanding and expertise.
• Initial Setup Challenges: Setting up an effective DevOps environment might involve initial challenges in integration and tooling.
• Resistance to Change: Resistance from teams familiar with traditional methods can hinder the implementation of DevOps principles.
• Security Concerns: Rapid iterations and frequent deployments might raise security vulnerabilities if not managed properly.
• Dependency on Tools: Dependency on various tools and technologies might create a challenge in terms of tool compatibility and maintenance.

We all know about Netflix, the world’s leading media subscription provider that streams various TV shows and movies on our favorite smart devices, delivering the best experience anywhere at any time to more than 75 million global customers.

Let’s understand how Netflix uses DevOps to provide its customers with the best and smooth video streaming experience. Netflix uses Spinnaker’s continuous delivery platform for the continuous delivery of its application. Before reaching Spinnaker, several steps are supposed to take place.

Let’s understand this from the diagram below:

Before going with Spinnaker for deployment, the code has to be first built and then tested.

Netflix uses Nebula for the build; it considers Nebula as the best build tool for Java applications. It is a collection of Gradle plugins meant for Netflix engineers to eliminate boilerplate build logic and provide sane conventions.

A Simple Java Application Build. gradle File

Further, the code is tested locally using Nebula. The changes, if any, are committed to their central Git repository. Also, Netflix migrates its monolith application to the cloud-based microservices in AWS. The microservice architecture allows teams at Netflix to be loosely coupled, building and pushing changes at a speed they are comfortable with.

A Jenkins job is created that helps execute Nebula, which further builds, tests, and packages the application for further deployment. The build is further ‘baked’ into an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). For generating AMIs from the source, Netflix creates a bakery, and the bakery exposes an API that facilitates the creation of AMIs globally.

Once the baking is complete, Spinnaker comes into the picture which helps in deployment by making the resultant AMIs available for the tens, hundreds, and thousands of instances.

After this continuous integration, deployment, and final availability, the application goes live.

Since we thoroughly understand what DevOps is and how it works, now, we now need to know the various DevOps Engineer skills one should possess.

Roles and Responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer

DevOps is more of a culture that is being incorporated by the giants in the IT world currently. DevOps, when practiced the right way keeping certain roles and responsibilities in mind, helps overcome the gap between development and operations teams.

The roles and responsibilities of DevOps Engineers are as follows:

• Project planning and management: In addition to monitoring software and regulating and updating tools, DevOps Engineers need to have expertise in keeping track of the costs, benefits, risks, and much more of various DevOps projects.
• Design, development, and deployment: DevOps Engineers are required to design, develop, and deploy automated modules for smooth functioning within the production environment, by utilizing risk-management techniques, tests, etc.
• Communication and support: DevOps Engineers should have exceptional communication skills that come in handy when they need to work and coordinate with different departments and provide support.
• Technical skills: Some basic technical experience and familiarity with configuration tools are a must.
• Interpersonal skills: Since DevOps Engineers are in constant interaction with other departments in the organization, they should be approachable, organized, and foresighted team players with an ability to multitask.
• Troubleshooting: Last but not least, one of the major responsibilities of DevOps Engineers is to troubleshoot and come up with apt solutions for various errors to benefit the firm with speed and efficiency.

The main aim behind adopting all these roles and responsibilities is to be able to perform coding, scripting, and process re-engineering.

What are career opportunities awaiting skillful DevOps Engineers? Let’s dig into this DevOps Tutorial.

Job Opportunities in DevOps

DevOps opens up a huge world of career options. If we are skillful enough and certified, we can go for any of the below-mentioned profiles and bag high salaries.

• DevOps Evangelist: Identifies the benefits coming from DevOps and thus aids in the promotion of DevOps
• Code Release Manager: Understands the Agile methodology and supervises the overall progress
• Automation Architect: Designs and builds automated tools and systems to implement continuous and smooth deployments
• Experience Assurance: Enhances user experience by finding bugs and including all the essential features in the applications
• Software Developer/Tester: Makes sure that the code meets all the original business requirements, along with performing testing and monitoring
• Security Engineer: Integrates security into the applications and products to keep the business safe

From this extensive DevOps tutorial, we acquired a detailed understanding of DevOps, its life cycle, various DevOps tools, its use cases, and most importantly the roles and responsibilities of DevOps Engineers.

While here we covered quite a bit of the core functionality of DevOps, there is still a lot more to know. If you’re looking forward to learning more about it, then you must go for a structured DevOps Certification Training provided by Intellipaat, where you will work on various case-based scenarios, along with exhaustive topic-wise assignments, hands-on sessions, and various industrial-based DevOps projects, which would prepare you for getting placed in top-notch companies.

This course will help you understand DevOps concepts and the most important tools and frameworks that you must learn to use to become a successful and productive DevOps team member at your workplace.

Do let us know in the comment section if this DevOps tools tutorial for beginners was helpful to you.

We hope this tutorial helps you gain knowledge of DevOps course online. If you are looking to learn DevOps course in a systematic manner with expert guidance and support then you can enroll to our DevOps Training.