In this chapter, we will discuss how to quickly get an understanding of DevOps from 10,000 feet, with best practices on how to prepare for changing a culture. This will allow us to build the foundations of the DevOps concepts by discussing what our goals are, as well as getting buy-in from organization management. Basically, we will try to cover DevOps practices that can make application life cycle management easy and effective.

It is very important to understand that DevOps is not a framework, tool, or technology. It is more about the culture of an organization. It is also a way people work in an organization using defined processes and by utilizing automation tools to make daily work more effective and less manual.

To understand the basic importance of DevOps, we will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Need for DevOps
• How DevOps culture can evolve
• Importance of PPT—people, process, and technology
• Why DevOps is not all about tools
• DevOps assessment questions

There is a famous quote by Harriet Tubman which you can find on (http://harriettubmanbiography.com). It says :

Change is the law of life and that is applicable to organizations as well. If any organization or individual looks only at the past or present patterns, culture, or practices, then they are certain to miss future best practices. In the dynamic IT world, we need to keep pace with the technology evolution.

We can relate to George Bernard Shaw's saying:

Here, we are focusing on changing the way we manage the application life cycle.

The important question is whether we really need this change? Do we really need to go through the pain of this change?

The answer is yes.

One may say that such kinds of change in business or culture must not be forceful.

Agree.

Let's understand the pain points faced by organizations in application life cycle management in the modern world with the help of the following figure:

Considering the changing patterns and competitive environment in business, it is the need of the hour to improve application life cycle management.

Are there any factors that can be helpful in these modern times which can help us to improve application life cycle management?

Yes. Cloud computing has changed the game. It has opened doors for many path-breaking solutions and innovations. Let’s understand what cloud computing really means and how terms like DevOps and automation play an important role for enterprise companies.

Cloud computing is the next logical step in terms of the evolution of computing. From traditional data centers and virtualization, to hybrid environments, private, public, and hybrid cloud services, cloud computing is a type of computing that provides multitenant or dedicated computing resources such as compute, storage, and network, which are delivered to cloud consumers on demand. It comes in different flavors which include cloud deployment models and cloud service models. The most important thing in this is the way its pricing model works, which is pay-as-you-go.

Cloud deployment models describe the way cloud resources are deployed:

1) Private cloud: private cloud consists of cloud resources that are behind the firewall and on-premise exclusively for a specific organization
2) Public cloud: public cloud consists of cloud resources that are available to all organizations and individuals
3) Hybrid cloud: hybrid cloud consists of cloud resources that are available to a specific set of organizations that share similar types of interests or similar types of requirements
4) Community cloud: community cloud consists of cloud resources that combine two or more deployment models

Cloud service models describe the way cloud resources are made available to customers of all kinds, from individuals and small organizations, to large enterprises.

It can be in the form of pure infrastructure, where virtual machines are accessible and controlled by cloud consumers or end users, that is, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); or a platform where runtime environments are provided so that the installation and configuration of all software needed to run the application is already available and managed by cloud service providers, that is, Platform as a service (PaaS); or Software as a Service (SaaS), where the whole application is made available by cloud service providers with the responsibility of infrastructure and the platform remaining with the cloud service provider.

There are many Service Models that have emerged during the last few years, but IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS are based on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) definition:

Cloud computing has a few characteristics that are significant such as multitenancy, pay-as-you-use similar to electricity or gas connection, On Demand Self Service, Resource Pooling for better utilization of compute, storage, and network resources, Rapid Elasticity for scaling up and scaling down resources, based on needs, in an automated fashion, and Measured Service for billing.

Over the years, the usage of different cloud deployment models has varied based on use cases. Initially, public cloud was used for applications that were considered noncritical, while private cloud was used for critical applications where security was a major concern.

Hybrid cloud and public cloud usage has evolved over time, with the experience and confidence in the services provided by cloud service providers. Similarly, the usage of different cloud service models has varied based on use cases and flexibility. IaaS was the most popular in the early days, but PaaS is catching up in its maturity and ease of use with enterprise capabilities such as auto-scaling, support for multiple programming languages, and support for end-to-end application life cycle management tools.

DevOps is all about the culture of an organization, processes, and technology to develop communication and collaboration between development and IT operations teams to manage the application life cycle more effectively than the existing ways of doing it. We often tend to work based on patterns to find reusable solutions from similar kinds of problems or challenges.

Over the years, achievements and failed experiments, best practices, automation scripts, configuration management tools, and methodologies have become an integral part of DevOps culture.

It helps to define practices for a way of designing, a way of developing, a way of testing, a way of setting up resources, a way of managing environments, a way of configuration management, a way of deploying an application, a way of gathering feedback, a way of code improvements, and a way of doing innovations.

The following are some of the visible benefits that can be achieved by implementing DevOps practices.

DevOps culture is considered an innovative package to integrate Dev and Ops teams in an effective manner that includes components such as continuous build integration, continuous testing, cloud resource provisioning, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, continuous monitoring, continuous feedback, continuous improvement, and continuous innovation to make application delivery faster, as per the demands of agile methodology. Evolving a culture is not an overnight journey. It takes a long time. However, there are also confusions regarding what DevOps is, hence, often only continuous integration or configuration management practices are considered as a DevOps practices implementation. It is a scenario similar to that of the elephant and five blind men, where every man touches a specific part of his body and assumes that to be an elephant.

However, it is not only the development and operations teams that are involved. The testing team, business analysts, build engineers, automation team, cloud team, and many other stakeholders are involved in this exercise of evolving the existing culture.

The DevOps culture is not much different than the organization culture, which has shared values and behavioral aspects. It needs adjustment in mindsets and processes to align with new technology and tools.

There are some challenges, which is why this scenario has occurred and that is why DevOps is going in the upward direction and is the talk of the town in all information technology related discussions.

Developers are enthusiastic and willing to adopt new technologies and approaches to solve problems. However, they face many challenges, including the following:

• The competitive market creates pressure for on-time delivery
• They have to take care of production-ready code management and new feature implementation
• The release cycle is often long, hence, the development team has to make assumptions before the application deployment finally takes place. In such a scenario, it takes more time to fix the issues that occur during deployment in the staging or production environment

The operations team is always careful in changing resources or using any new technologies or new approaches, as they want stability. However, they face many challenges, including the following:

• Resource contention: it's difficult to handle increasing resource demands
• Redesigning or tweaking: this is needed to run the application in the production environment
• Diagnosing and rectifying: they are supposed to diagnose and rectify issues after application deployment in isolation

The IT team provides resources to the respective teams to carry out the operations:

• Infrastructure provisioning: to provide infrastructure and a runtime environment with proper package installation on resources
• Configuration management: to upgrade the existing infrastructure or packages based on updates available in tools or technologies

Considering all the challenges faced by the development and operations teams, how should we improve existing processes, make use of automation tools to make processes more effective, and change people's mindset? Let's see in the next section on how to evolve the DevOps culture in an organization and improve efficiency and effectiveness.

Inefficient estimation, a long time to market, and other issues led to a change in the waterfall model, resulting in the agile model. Evolving a culture is not a time-bound or overnight process. It can be a step-by-step and stagewise process that can be achieved without dependencies on the other stages.

We can achieve continuous integration without Cloud Provisioning. We can achieve Cloud Provisioning without Configuration Management. We can achieve Continuous Testing without any other DevOps practices. The following are different stages to achieve DevOps practices:

Agile development or agile-based methodologies are useful for building an application by empowering individuals and encouraging interactions, giving importance to working software, customer collaboration—using feedback for improvement in subsequent steps—and responding to change in an efficient manner.

One of the most attractive benefits of agile development is continuous delivery in short time frames or, in agile terms, sprints. Thus, the agile approach of application development, improvement in technology, and disruptive innovations and approaches have created a gap between the development and operations teams.

DevOps attempts to fill these gaps by developing a partnership between the development and operations teams. The DevOps movement emphasizes communication, collaboration, and integration between software developers and IT operations.

DevOps promotes collaboration, and collaboration is facilitated by automation and orchestration in order to improve processes. In other words, DevOps essentially extends the continuous development goals of the agile movement to continuous integration and release.

DevOps is a combination of agile practices and processes, leveraging the benefits of cloud solutions. Agile development and testing methodologies help us meet the goals of continuously integrating, developing, building, deploying, testing, and releasing applications.

An automated build helps us create an application build using build automation tools such as Gradle, Apache Ant, and Apache Maven.

An automated build process includes activities such as compiling source code into class files or binary files, providing references to third-party library files, providing the path of configuration files, packaging class files or binary files into package files, executing automated test cases, deploying package files on local or remote machines, and reducing manual effort in creating the package file.

In simple words, continuous integration or CI is a software engineering practice, where each check-in made by a developer is verified by either of the following:

• Pull mechanism: executing an automated build at a scheduled time
• Push mechanism: executing an automated build when changes are saved in the repository

This step is followed by executing a unit test against the latest changes available in the source code repository. Continuous integration is a popular DevOps practice that requires developers to integrate code into code repositories such as Git and SVN multiple times a day to verify the integrity of the code.

Each check-in is then verified by an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems early.

CI, and even CD, is the baseline for companies to even archive DevOps. We can’t do DevOps without good CI and CD implementations in your organization.

We have already covered the basics of cloud computing earlier in the chapter. Cloud provisioning has opened the door to treat Infrastructure as Code (IAC), and that makes the entire process extremely efficient and effective, as we are automating a process which involved manual intervention to a huge extent.

The pay-as-you-go billing model has made the required resources more affordable to not only large organizations, but also to mid and small scale organizations, as well as individuals.

It helps to go for improvements and innovations, as earlier resource constraints were blocking organizations from going the extra mile because of cost and maintenance. Once we have agility in infrastructure resources, we can then think of automating the installation and configuration of packages that are required to run the application.

Configuration management (CM) manages changes in the system or, to be more specific, the server runtime environment. There are many tools available in the market with which we can achieve configuration management. The popular tools are Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt, and so on.

Let's consider an example where we need to manage multiple servers with the same kind of configuration.

For example, we need to install Tomcat on each server. What if we need to change the port on all servers, update some packages, or provide rights to some users? Any kind of modification in this scenario is a manual and, if so, error-prone process. As the same configuration is being used for all the servers, automation can be useful here.

Continuous delivery and continuous deployment are used interchangeably. However, there is a small difference between them.

Continuous delivery is process of deploying an application in any environment in an automated fashion and providing continuous feedback to improve its quality.

An automated approach may not change in continuous delivery and continuous deployment. The approval process and some other minor things can change.

Continuous testing is the very important phase of the end-to-end application life cycle management process. It involves functional testing, performance testing, security testing, and so on.

Selenium, Appium, Apache JMeter, and many other tools can be utilized for the same.

Continuous deployment, on the other hand, is all about deploying an application with the latest changes to the production environment.

Continuous monitoring is a backbone of the end-to-end delivery pipeline, and open source monitoring tools are like toppings on an ice cream scoop.

It is desirable to have monitoring at almost every stage in order to have transparency about all the processes, as shown in the following diagram. It also helps us troubleshoot quickly. Monitoring should be a well thought-out implementation of a plan.

Let's try to depict the entire process as a continuous approach in the following diagram:

We need to understand here that it is a phased approach and it is not necessary to automate every phase of automation at once. It is more effective to take one DevOps practice at a time, implement it and realize its benefit before implementing another one.

This way we are safe enough to assess the improvements of changing the culture in the organization and remove manual efforts from the application life cycle management.

PPT is an important word in any organization. Wait! We are not talking about Powerpoint Presentation. Here, we are focusing on people, processes, and tools/technology. Let's understand why and how they are important in changing the culture of any organization.

As per the famous quote from Jack Canfield :

A curious question could be, why do people matter? If we try to answer this in one sentence, then it would be: Because we are trying to change culture.

So?

People are an important part of any culture and only people can drive the change or change themselves to adapt to new processes or define new processes and learn new tools or technologies.

Let's understand how and why with the Formula for Change.

David Gleicher created the Formula for Change in the early 1960s, as per references available in Wikipedia. Kathie Dannemiller refined it in 1980. This formula provides a model to assess the relative strengths affecting the possible success of organizational change initiatives.

Gleicher (original) version: C = (ABD) > X, where: C = change, A = the status quo dissatisfaction, B = a desired clear state, D = is practical steps to the desired state, X = the cost of the change.

Dannemiller version: D x V x F > R; where D, V, and F must be present for organizational change to take place where: D = Dissatisfaction with how things are now, V = Vision of what is possible, F = First concrete steps that can be taken toward the vision. If the product of these three factors is greater than R = Resistance, then change is possible.

Essentially, it implies that there has to be strong dissatisfaction with existing things or processes, vision of what is possible with new trends, technologies, and innovations with respect to the market scenario; concrete steps that can be taken toward achieving the vision.

If it comes to sharing an experience, I would say it is very important to train people to adopt a new culture. It is a game of patience. We can't change the mindset of people overnight and we need to understand first before changing the culture.

Often, it is observed in the industry, that job opening with a DevOps knowledge or DevOps engineers, but ideally they should not be imported and people should instead be trained in the existing environment by changing things gradually to manage resistance. We don't need a special DevOps team; we need more communication and collaboration between developers, test teams, automation enablers, and the cloud or infrastructure team.

It is essential for all to understand the pain points of each other. In the organizations I have worked, we used to have a Center of Excellence (COE) in place to manage new technologies, innovations, or culture. As an automation enabler and part of the DevOps team, we should be working as a facilitator only and not a part of the silo.

Here is a famous quote from Tom Peters, which says:

Quality is extremely important when we are dealing with evolving a culture. We need processes and policies for doing things in a proper way and standardized across the projects so the sequence of operations, constraints, rules and so on are well defined to measure success.

We need to set processes for the following things:

• Agile planning
• Resource planning and provisioning
• Configuration management
• Role-based access control to cloud resources and other tools used in automation
• Static code analysis – rules for programming languages
• Testing methodology and tools
• Release management

These processes are also important for measuring success in the process of evolving DevOps culture.

Here is a famous quote from Steve Jobs, which says:

Technology helps people and organizations to bring creativity and innovations while changing the culture. Without technology, it is difficult to achieve speed and effectiveness in the daily and routine automation operations. Cloud computing, configuration management tools, and the build pipeline are among a few that are useful in resource provisioning, installing a runtime environment, and orchestration. Essentially, it helps to speed up different aspects of application life cycle management.

Yes, tools are nothing. They are not that important a factor in changing the culture of any organization. The reason is very simple. No matter what technology we use, we will perform continuous integration, cloud provisioning, configuration management, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, continuous monitoring, and so on.

Categorywise, different tool sets can be used, but all perform similar operations. It is just the way that tool performs a certain operation that differs, else the outcome is the same. The following are some of the tools based on the categories:

Let's see how different tools can be useful in different stages for different operations. This may change based on the number of environments or the number of DevOps practices we follow in different organizations:

If we need to categorize tools based on different DevOps best practices, then we can categorize them based on open source and commercial categories. The following are just some examples:

In this book, we will try to focus on the open source category, as well as commercial tools. We will use Jenkins and Visual Studio Team Services for all the major automation and orchestration-related activities.

DevOps is a culture and we are very much aware of that fact. However, before implementing automation, putting processes in place and evolving culture, we need to understand the existing status of the organization's culture and whether we need to introduce new processes or automation tools.

We need to be very clear that we need to make the existing culture more efficient rather than importing culture. To accommodate an assessment framework is difficult, but we will try to provide some questions and hints based on which it will be easier to create an assessment framework.

Create categories for which we want to ask questions and get responses for specific applications.

The following are a few sample questions:

1. Do you follow agile principles?
2. Are you using any source code repository?
3. Are you using any tools for static code analysis?
4. Are you using any build automation tools?
5. Are you using on-premise infrastructure or cloud-based infrastructure?
6. Are you using any configuration management tools or scripts for installing application packages or a runtime environment?
7. Are you using any automated scripts to deploy applications in prod and nonprod environments?
8. Are you using any orchestration tools or scripts for application life cycle management?

9. Are you using automation tools for functional testing, load testing, security testing, and mobile testing?
10. Are you using any tools for application and infrastructure monitoring?

Once the questions are ready, prepare responses and, based on those responses, decide a rating for each response given for the preceding questions.

Make a framework flexible so, even if we change a question in any category, it will be managed automatically.

Once the rating is given, capture responses and calculate overall ratings by introducing different conditions and intelligence into the framework.

Create categorywise final ratings and create different kinds of charts from the final rating to improve the reading value of it. The important thing to note here is the significance of organizations' expertise in each area of application life cycle management. It will give the assessment framework a new dimension to add intelligence and make it more effective.

In this chapter, we have set many goals to achieve throughout this book. We have covered continuous integration, resource provisioning in the cloud environment, configuration management, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, and continuous monitoring.

We have seen how cloud computing has changed the way innovation was previously perceived and how feasible it has become now. We have also covered the need for DevOps and all different DevOps practices in brief. People, processes, and technology are also important in this whole process of changing the existing culture of an organization. We tried to touch upon the reasons why they are important. Tools are important but not the show stopper; any toolset can be utilized and changing a culture doesn't need a specific set of tools. We have discussed in brief the DevOps assessment framework as well. It will help you to get going on the path of changing culture.

In the next chapter, we will take our first step of this journey towards continuous integration. We will use Jenkins and Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services for implementing continuous integration and verify how CI can be implemented in different tools without any major challenges.