DevOps is more of an idea than it is a methodology, the core principle of DevOps is to bring various teams working on a dedicated project to a single focal point where they can collaborate and they can communicate with each other. This way they can bring about the best results for development of processes, tools, software and updates and deploy all of these on a better note to the customers. Learning about the DevOps online can provide you with a broad understanding of how DevOps based systems work and how they can be used to solve cloud oriented errors.
DevOps is the combination of a variety of tools and processes that are interconnected and linked with each other, following is a list of multiple DevOps tools and how we can use them to solve our day-to-day cloud computing problems;
- Continuous development
This is considered as the first or beginning phase of develop systems and is used to plan ahead the basic structure of the application or software you are going to build. These tools cannot be used for the development of code but continuous development can help in the maintenance of that code. If you must really attend to it then you would begin to see that the very perception of a software or app which is to be developed is grabbed in the beginning or coding phase. As you might have already noticed that the code can be written in any given language but its integrity can only be protected and perceived by special continuous development tools such as Git, SVN, CVS and JIRA.
Various versions are manufactured and maintained with a special blank where the latest code for the application is held and is made accessible to any and all professionals working on the development project. This is a magnificent step in the world of cloud computing because as it happens there can be a lot of bugs and incompetence ease with the code itself that is why using these versions scientists can quickly rollback to a more stable version and revert the anomaly in a best professional way possible.
- Continuous Testing
The next in line is the continuous testing phase, this is the most important phase in the development and deployment processes of software and tools. When a code is developed and is fully integrated the concept of continuous testing is brought around. One of the most dedicated feature of this tool is to check whether or not there are some kind of anomalies or viruses or structural deficiencies which need to be resolved before the software or package can be delivered to the customers. Automation testing can save a lot of time not only for the organization but the professionals executing it and the main reason is that no minimal input is required and all the tests can be executed at predefined times.
Selenium is the best possible choice here as it would grab the results of the continuous testing and TestNG which is another tool will compile the results. A trigger is required to do all of this and this is where the use of Jenkins come into play.
- Continuous integration
Continuous integration as the name persists is the art of mixing the complete work of the individual professionals into a main stream array of code. Now continuous integration can help the cloud computing industry in a lot of ways, the professionals won't have to worry about working on their representative codes and then having to integrate them into a proper or compiled structure right from the beginning. Every professional will complete their part and work on their code and when they are fully tested and are satisfied with its performance this newly written code can then be made part of the main code.
This is how Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all the multi-conglomerates are surviving with an ever increase of their services by the customers and other shared resources. Integration can also help an organization to play with different features all at the same time, for example if a new feature was introduced into a certain app or tool and customers didn't like it then instead of abolishing the whole tool that part or that specific feature can be eradicated and that would still be a win win. The continuous integration tools can be orchestrated with development, management, configuration and deployment of the services, which is a vast array being covered by DevOps.
- Continuous Deployment
When you are done with continuous integration the next step that lies ahead is the initiation of continuous deployment. So how does continuous deployment work? Well first of all the complete code needs to be tested and managed so that it can be transferred in a single package which then can be delivered to the customers. All of this can't happen at once because there are certain breaks and clauses that needs to be augmented first.
Puppet is the most intensive continuous deployment tool which is still used in cloud computing networks, what it does is to play a master slave conundrum. When a certain package for a specific tool or an update arrives to the puppet for it to be sent along to the consumers, it receives that information as a command and being in charge of other directives or processes it replicates that information across all servers. The concept of containerization also comes into play here with Docker and Kubernetes play an important role but this is still a very modern concept and is rarely used in basics of cloud computing but it is still taking it's toll over the DevOps intensive environments.
- Continuous monitoring
To minimize the consequences of buggy features and full of error based systems reaching the customers, continuous monitoring is a tool which shares it services. Here all of the specific servers and code oriented systems are monitored for any indication of errors or threat oriented programs for reaching to the customers and then based on real time results corrective actions are then applied.
All of these tools can be applied as DevOps practices and can be widely used by cloud computing industries for solving their regular cloud computing based problems.