ABOUT THE AUTHOR Preface Introduction to DevOps... 6

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2 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR... 3 Preface... 4 Introduction to DevOps... 6 Introduction... 6 Part 1: What is DevOps... 6 Part 2: Principles of DevOps... 7 Part 3: Why DevOps Exist... 7 Conclusion... 8 Interaction between people, process and product... 9 Introduction... 9 The Three Stage Conversation People, Process, Products People: Process: Products: Conclusion Structure of DevOps...12 Introduction Part 1: DevOps Frame Part 2: DevOps Practices Conclusion

3 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mohamed Radwan is a Visual Studio ALM MVP and DevOps practice lead; he focuses on providing solutions for the various roles involved in software development and delivery through Agile Methodologies and utilization of Microsoft Visual Studio ALM/DevOps Tools & Technologies. Mohamed excels in software practices and automation with 15+ years of professional experience spanning the different stages and phases of Software Development Lifecycle. He has helped various customers across the world in the UK, Denmark, USA, Egypt, Oman, KSA, Kuwait, and Libya, amongst others. Mohamed specialized in Agile Methodologies, and is a frequent speaker at many national and regional technology events and user groups for various countries, such as: Campus Days in Denmark, Copenhagen user group, Open Days in Egypt, KSA, Kuwait, and Oman. He has authored several frameworks and extensions including DevMagicFake and TestingConf Utilities, as well as many technical articles & guides. He is the founder of the TFSEG and co-founder of the MEAALM Community. Mohamed also holds a number of Microsoft certifications including MCT, MCPD, MCITP in EPM, MCTS (7), MCSD, MCAD, and CIW. 3

4 PREFACE This guide will help you to understand the fundamentals of DevOps, which is grouping different older and newer concepts into a movement that is aiming to have a strong automation of all development steps and to deliver high quality products in shorter development cycles, with frequent deployment and closely aligned with business objectives. DevOps is a firm connection between Development and IT Operations, bringing the teams on the same page in order to achieve better collaboration, faster releases, higher trust and better management of unexpected work. This guide will explain in later chapters the importance of high collaboration between the teams and cross functionality. This close collaboration between development and operations is enabling teams to build, test and release software faster, with rapid delivery circles and with higher reliability and stability. Of course, this doesn t mean that developers need to transform themselves into being the best operations staff, which is common misconception of the DevOps. It means that the development is pairing with the operations in the whole development lifecycle, in order to have full insight in every aspect of the development cycle and to be able to respond on issues quickly. In this way, the development team will be participating also in running their product which will help them to solve any issues better and quicker. And it s not only about solving the issues or the bugs, it s also about continuous improvement. Besides this key factor, the close collaboration between the teams is building higher trust and mutual respect. First chapter of this guide will explain more in depth about basic principles of DevOps and why DevOps actually exists. In the second chapter the guide will explain more about interaction between people, process and the product which is the heart of the DevOps methodology, as DevOps isn t a job or responsibility of one person, it s about sharing the responsivity and understanding that everyone is responsible for delivering high quality product to the customer or end user. Next or the third chapter of this guide will focus more on the practices, which helps the organizations to deliver faster and more reliable products 4

5 to their customers. Practices such as Continuous Integration and Delivery are based on high automation in order to improve the quality, to reduce the validation time of releases and to find bugs in quicker time. Other practices, such as usage of Micro services and Infrastructure as a code are reducing the dependencies and increasing the possibilities for quicker deployments. 5

INTRODUCTION TO DEVOPS Introduction DevOps is about improving the collaboration between the traditionally soiled development and operations functions.

6 INTRODUCTION TO DEVOPS Introduction DevOps is about improving the collaboration between the traditionally soiled development and operations functions. DevOps is all about trust, communication and merging of two different disciplines inside IT. On one side, we have developers and on the other side we have operations. DevOps is an extension of Agile software development principles allowing us to build, deploy and change our software with accelerated delivery cycle times. Part 1: What is DevOps Traditional Development and Operations teams worked in a way that Development team created a solution for production and when it was finished they handed over to Operations team. Operations team then started with preparation to implement the project in the production environment and manually changed the configuration files and other data in order to comply for deployment. This caused a lot of duplication and issues which were very hard to resolve due to different files and environments. 6

7 DevOps is a software development method that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and information technology (IT) professionals thereby: Enable rapid evolution of products and services Lower the risk, enhance quality across portfolio, and reduce costs DevOps integration targets product delivery, quality testing, feature development and maintenance releases in order to improve reliability and security and faster development and deployment cycles. The adoption of DevOps is being motivated by following factors: Use of Agile and other development operations; Requirement for an expanded rate of production releases from application and business stakeholders. Extensive possibility of visualized and cloud infrastructure from internal and external providers. Enlarged usage of data center automation and configuration management tools. Part 2: Principles of DevOps One of the commonly cited DevOps principle is Infrastructure as a code. Another major principle is also to get the fast feedback throughout every phase of the software lifecycle. Feedback helps to achieve the higher quality of code and to reduce as much as possible bugs in the production. Moreover, the DevOps practices helps to gather data to identify, diagnose, and resolve issues quickly. Develop and test in an environment similar to production Frequent Build deployment Continuous validation of operation quality Strengthen feedback loops Part 3: Why DevOps Exist There is a gap between Developers and Operations team. With the implementation of DevOps: 7

8 Close collaboration between Developers and Operations to Developers work with to understand the impact of code changes. Developers work is done in environment which is very close to production environment. Developers are focused on metrics required by Ops team. More transparency for Operations on infrastructure needs. Higher level of automation on deployment. The pipeline of Dev Test Prod is closely monitored for each deployment with immediate feedback. Better collaboration and communication. Conclusion DevOps is helping businesses in a tremendous way. Its bridging the gap between Developer s need for change and Operations resist to change and thus create a smooth path for continuous development and continuous integration. You might also be interested in taking DevOps Self-Assessment. You can visit Microsoft s website and gauge your readiness in the 7 key DevOps practice areas. 8

INTERACTION BETWEEN PEOPLE, PROCESS AND PRODUCT Introduction Just to summarize once again, DevOps is a methodology interacting between Development and Operations.

9 INTERACTION BETWEEN PEOPLE, PROCESS AND PRODUCT Introduction Just to summarize once again, DevOps is a methodology interacting between Development and Operations. It is all about improving the joint effort between functions of Development and Operations. The DevOps methodology in a software world is often also referred as a methodology that overcomes the gap between Agile software development and operations, as it enables a fluent process for Continuous Development and Continuous Integration. It s also very important to highlight that usage of DevOps methodology reduces the stress in communication, helps to improve the communication between teams, collaboration between all participants and integration between developers and operations teams. In delivering valuable software to customers, too often development and operations are in conflict with each other. When Development implement the changes, such as new features, bugs or fixes, they want to quickly roll out this changes to production. But once when software is already delivered, the operations departments wants to avoid to make the changes on the software. Here is where DevOps help to overcome the gap between both teams. 9

10 Initially, there was Agile Development, when agility aspect was applied to operations it became Agile Administration, thus DevOps was formed. Here is a must-read article by Visual Studio Magazine Taking DevOps to the next level: It s all about continuous delivery. In this section, I m going to describe a bit deeper view about Three important stages of Conversation, which are People, Process and Products. The Three Stage Conversation People, Process, Products DevOps is the correlation of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to end users. The outcomes are tightly connected to ability for frequent releases and at the same time to keep the same level of quality. People: Thinking of DevOps at a really high level, it s first all about people. DevOps business, everybody that is involved, that needs to deliver value to the business is working very tightly together on a common goal of adding value to the customer. The latest study by Gartner, which involved 367 IT and leading companies, from which 113 companies were using DevOps, showed that people issue is the biggest concern in the share of interviewed participants. This study also revealed that the share of process and IT issues is on less lower level, than people issue. So we can think that having highly motivated people with good collaboration between teams is very important. Process: Next DevOps is about process because even if you have those people that are good working together but then you have got business process in a way that is really blocking innovation, for instance long chain advisory boards before they can do something or they are restricted to doing things in a certain way that really impedes that kind of innovation. The process of designing, building and testing software should be well presented to each individual team member, to make every team member aware of all parts of the development process. The implementation of DevOps process into company is a hard work, as it completely changes the company s structure as a whole. 10

11 That s part of a bigger picture of DevOps. Enabling efficient flow of people working together and not having processes get in the way but having processes and practices that help enable that value deliver to your customers. Products: DevOps is not a tool or product. You can t buy the DevOps, as DevOps is not a software, tool, process, company or person, it s a methodology used especially by IT professionals. But there are products, tools and services that really help enable different DevOps practices and different teams can use to make things easier. From very high level those tools are Microsoft Azure, which is offering a lot of different products and services, such as Microsoft Azure Stack and Microsoft Azure. Besides Microsoft Azure there are also other products related to DevOps practices, such as Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS). Conclusion So, DevOps is working like a mediator between Development and Operations and is helping businesses in a tremendous way that need continuous change to thrive in the competitive market. DevOps is not a software, tool, person or process, it s way much more than that. It is a philosophy, which is changing the work practices in IT in the way which requires tight collaboration between everyone involved to enable continuous delivery to the end users. 11

STRUCTURE OF DEVOPS Introduction DevOps is a methodology that refers to anything that settles the interaction between development and operations.

12 STRUCTURE OF DEVOPS Introduction DevOps is a methodology that refers to anything that settles the interaction between development and operations. Development needs as much changes as possible to grow and to meet the needs of the changing time while for Operations change is the enemy. Operations require stability and strongly resist change that is a need for Development. Part 1: DevOps Frame DevOps is a strategy intended to bring perfection in software delivery lifecycle by aligning development and Operations teams around the business goals. As per Microsoft s standard level definitions DevOps Level 100 is introductory and overview material. It covers topic concepts, functions, features, and benefits. DevOps Level 200 is intermediate material. Assumes 100-level knowledge and provides specific details about the topic. DevOps Level 300 is advanced material. Assumes 200-level knowledge, in-depth understanding of features in a real-world environment, and strong coding skills. Provides a detailed technical overview of a subset of product/technology features, covering architecture, performance, migration, deployment, and development. 12

13 Part 2: DevOps Practices There are many fundamental DevOps practices. Few of them are listed below: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the practice in which the techniques, processes, and tool sets used in software development are leveraged to manage the deployment and configuration of systems, applications, and middleware. Most of the testing and deployment defects occur when developer s environments differ from testing and production environments. Putting these environments under version control yields immediate benefits in consistency, time savings, error rates, and auditability. Under Continuous Integration (CI) practice, the working copies of all the developers code are combined with a shared mainline. Automated Testing is the practice where various tests such as load, functional, integration, and unit tests happen automatically either after you check in code (i.e. attached to CI) or some other means to fire off one or more tests automatically against a specific build or app. Release management is a practice intended to oversee the development, testing, deployment and support of software releases. Configuration Management is the practice for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product s performance with its requirements, design and operational information throughout its life. 13

14 Conclusion DevOps is all about better delivery practices, automation, removing bottlenecks and is Agile at Organization level. DevOps is not a tool. It cannot be built or achieved in a day or a month. It is a path a roadmap that needs to be followed. 14

IT Career Opportunities. Copyright 2012 CollabNet, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

IT Career Opportunities. Copyright 2012 CollabNet, Inc. All Rights Reserved. IT Career Opportunities Copyright 2012 CollabNet, Inc. All Rights Reserved. DevOps - What are people are saying The Future of DevOps is in development taking responsibility for deployment, while operations