DevOps engineer with a strategic understanding of tools, processes and utilization of technology
What you will learn:
- DevOps objectives and vocabulary
- Benefits to the business
- Concepts and practices — including its relationship to Agile, Lean and IT Service Management (ITSM)
- Improved workflows
- Improved communication and feedback loops
- Reliance on automation
- Applying DevOps in an enterprise environment
- Critical success factors and key performance indicators
- Real-life examples and results
DevOps is a philosophy, a cultural shift that merges operations with development and demands a linked toolchain of technologies to facilitate collaborative change
Organizations are adopting DevOps because of its many advantages and ability to combine continuous software delivery with fast fixes to problems in a stable operating environment. DevOps is a systematic approach that relies on collaborative effort between operations, development, and QA, through the entire lifecycle of a project that leads to continuous improvement and Agility.
Project/product managers or those working on Enterprise Infrastructures, are expected to understand the various DevOps tools and technologies and their use in solving infrastructure issues.
On top of fluency in web languages such as Ruby, Python, PHP or Java, the ideal DevOps engineer should have some experience using infrastructure automation tools like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, SaltStack or Windows PowerShell DSC. Since DevOps is a cultural approach and not just a set of automation tools, organizations think about the requisite interpersonal skills that make DevOps practitioners successful. Cross-team communication and collaboration strategies may be harder to bring across the table, than technical competencies, but they’re no less important.
If you plan to give an interview for a DevOps-centric role, here is a comprehensive list of the most popular DevOps interview questions. I have put myself in your shoes and most of the answers in this blog are written in first person – a person who is a potential DevOps expert.
What is the need for DevOps?
According to me, this answer should start by explaining the general market trend. Instead of releasing big sets of features, companies are trying to see if small features can be transported to their customers through a series of release trains. This has many advantages like quick feedback from customers, better quality of software etc. which in turn leads to high customer satisfaction. To achieve this, companies are required to:
- Increase deployment frequency
- Lower failure rate of new releases
- Shortened lead time between fixes
- Faster mean time to recovery in the event of new release crashing
How is DevOps different from Agile / SDLC?
Agile is a set of values and principles about how to produce i.e. develop software. Example: if you have some ideas and you want to turn those ideas into working software, you can use the Agile values and principles as a way to do that. But, that software might only be working on a developer’s laptop or in a test environment. You want a way to quickly, easily and repeatably move that software into production infrastructure, in a safe and simple way. To do that you need DevOps tools and techniques. You can summarize by saying Agile software development methodology focuses on the development of software but DevOps on the other hand is responsible for development as well as deployment of the software in the safest and most reliable way possible. Here’s a blog that will give you more information on the evolution of DevOps. Now remember, you have included DevOps tools in your previous answer so be prepared to answer some questions related to that.
Which are the top DevOps tools? Which tools have you worked on?
The most popular DevOps tools are mentioned below:
- Git : Version Control System tool
- Jenkins : Continuous Integration tool
- Selenium : Continuous Testing tool
- Puppet, Chef, Ansible : Configuration Management and Deployment tools
- Nagios : Continuous Monitoring tool
- Docker : Containerization tool
How do all these tools work together?
Given below is a generic logical flow where everything gets automated for seamless delivery. However, this flow may vary from organization to organization as per the requirement.
- Developers develop the code and this source code is managed by Version Control System tools like Git etc.
- Developers send this code to the Git repository and any changes made in the code is committed to this Repository.
- Jenkins pulls this code from the repository using the Git plugin and build it using tools like Ant or Maven.
- Configuration management tools like puppet deploys & provisions testing environment and then Jenkins releases this code on the test environment on which testing is done using tools like selenium.
- Once the code is tested, Jenkins send it for deployment on the production server (even production server is provisioned & maintained by tools like puppet).
- After deployment It is continuously monitored by tools like Nagios.
What is the most important thing DevOps helps us achieve?
According to me, the most important thing that DevOps helps us achieve is to get the changes into production as quickly as possible while minimizing risks in software quality assurance and compliance. This is the primary objective of DevOps. Learn more in this DevOps tutorial blog. However, you can add many other positive effects of DevOps. For example, clearer communication and better working relationships between teams i.e. both the Ops team and Dev team collaborate together to deliver good quality software which in turn leads to higher customer satisfaction.