DevOps... What is it like?

I've been trying to get my head around DevOps for a while and couldn't understand what the whole fuss was about. After much researching and reading things online, I think I've finally got the gist of this (though my colleagues would definitely point things missing on this). However, its all about learning and moving forwards.

The key take away from this was, how can we get changes deployed to production with minimum effort, in the most efficient manner and prevent outages/ breakdowns.

Further, if we were to scale this up, at an architectural level then we get into the debate about microservices v/s monolith architect. Which is a discussion for another day.

1.     PaaS Providers: CloudFoundry, Heroku

2.     Configuration Management Tools: SaltStack, Chef, Ansible

3.      IaaS Providers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud

4.     Virtualization Tools: VMWare, Oracle VirtualBox

5.     Operating System: Linux, Windows, MAC

6.     Containerization Tools: Docker

7.     Container Orchestration Tools: Kubernetes, OpenShift

8.     Version Control Tools: GIT(GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket), SVN

9.     Continuous Integration/ Build Tools: Jenkins, Bamboo CI, Travis CI, Concourse CI

10.  Application Performance Monitoring(APM): Splunk, DataDog, Dynatrace

11.   Log Analysis & Monitoring: ElasticSearch, Logstash

The above list ins't a definitive one, there are more tools and techniques being developed and published.

The stack which a developer/ company chooses to pursue is entirely dependent on the requirements, costs and turn around time for these applications

• Option 1: PaaS with monitoring tools
• Option 2: IaaS, with virtualization, virtual machines and monitoring tools
• Option 3: IaaS, with containerization, orchestration and monitoring tools

Each of these options would need management, maintenance, analysis and orchestration in order to automate the delivery of code and infrastructure.

The focus of this has been on the underlying architecture and what someone new needs to know/ understand in order to work within the DevOps framework.