Preface

With the adoption and popularity of cloud technology, DevOps has become the most happening buzzword in the industry. The concepts of DevOps are not new and have been implemented historically. In recent times, DevOps is getting implemented widespread in enterprise world. Companies that have not yet implemented DevOps have started discussing its potential implementation. In short, DevOps is becoming ubiquitous across both big and small organizations.  Organizations are trying to reach out to their customers more often with quality deliverables. They want to achieve this while reducing the risks involved in releasing to production. DevOps helps in releasing features more frequently, faster, and better, in a risk-free manner. It is a common misconception that DevOps is either about automation or technology. Technology and automation are enablers for DevOps and help better and faster DevOps implementation. DevOps is a mindset and culture, it is about how multiple teams come together for a common cause and collaborate with each other, it is about ensuring customers can derive value from software releases, and it is about bringing consistency, predictability, and confidence to overall application life cycle processes. DevOps also has levels of maturity. The highest level of DevOps is achieved when multiple releases can be made in an automated fashion with high quality through continuous integration, continuous delivery, and deployment. It is not necessary that every company should achieve this level of DevOps maturity. It depends on the nature of the company and its projects. While fully automated deployment is a need for some companies, it could be overkill for others. DevOps is a journey and companies typically start from a basic level of maturity by implementing a few of its practices. Eventually, these companies achieve high maturity as and when they keep improving and implementing more and more DevOps practices. DevOps is not complete without appropriate infrastructure for monitoring and measuring health of both environment and application. DevOps forms a closed loop, with operations providing feedback to development teams about things that work well in production and things that do not work well.

In this book, we will explore the main motivation for using DevOps and discuss in detail the implementation of its important practices. Configuration management, source code control, continuous integration, continuous delivery and deployment, monitoring and measuring concepts and implementation will be discussed in depth with the help of a sample application. We will walk through the entire process from scratch. On this journey, we will also explore all the relevant technologies used to achieve the end goal of DevOps.

This book has relevant theory around DevOps, but is heavy on actual implementation using tools and technologies available today. There are many ways to implement DevOps and this book talks about approaches using hands-on technology implementation. There is little or no material that talks about end-to-end DevOps implementations, and this book tries to fill this gap.

I have approached this book by keeping architects, developers and operations teams in mind. I have played these roles, understand the problems they go through, and tried to solve their challenges through practical DevOps implementation.

DevOps is an evolving paradigm and there will be advancements and changes in future. Readers will find this book relevant even in those times.