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DevOps

DevOps

3rd IBM Limited Edition

by Sanjeev Sharma

and Bernie Coyne

DevOps For Dummies®, 3rd IBM Limited Edition

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• INTRODUCTION
  • About This Book
  • Icons Used in This Book.......................................................................
  • Beyond the Book
• CHAPTER 1: What Is DevOps?
  • Understanding the Business Need for DevOps................................
  • Recognizing the Business Value of DevOps
    • Enhanced customer experience
    • Increased capacity to innovate......................................................
    • Faster time to value
  • Seeing How DevOps Works
    • Develop and test against production-like systems
    • Deploy with repeatable, reliable processes.................................
    • Monitor and validate operational quality
    • Amplify feedback loops
• CHAPTER 2: Looking at DevOps Capabilities
  • Paths to DevOps Adoption
  • Steer
  • Develop/Test
    • Collaborative development
    • Continuous testing........................................................................
  • Deploy
  • Operate................................................................................................
    • Continuous monitoring
    • Continuous customer feedback and optimization
• CHAPTER 3: Adopting DevOps
  • Knowing Where to Begin
    • Identifying business objectives
    • Identifying bottlenecks in the delivery pipeline
  • People in DevOps
    • DevOps culture..............................................................................
    • DevOps team
  • Process in DevOps
    • DevOps as a business process
    • Change management process
    • DevOps techniques.......................................................................
  • Technology in DevOps
    • Infrastructure as code vi DevOps For Dummies, 3rd IBM Limited Edition
    • Delivery pipeline
    • Deployment automation and release management
• CHAPTER 4: Looking at How Cloud Accelerates DevOps
  • Using Cloud as an Enabler for DevOps............................................
  • Full-Stack Deployments
  • Choosing a Cloud Service Model for DevOps
    • IaaS
    • PaaS
  • Understanding What a Hybrid Cloud Is
• CHAPTER 5: Using DevOps to Solve New Challenges
  • Mobile Applications............................................................................
  • ALM Processes
  • Scaling Agile
  • Multiple-Tier Applications
  • DevOps in the Enterprise
  • Supply Chains
  • The Internet of Things
• CHAPTER 6: Making DevOps Work: IBM’s Story
  • Taking a Look at the Executive’s Role
  • Putting Together the Team
  • Setting DevOps Goals
  • Learning from the DevOps Transformation
    • Expanding agile practices
    • Leveraging test automation.........................................................
    • Building a delivery pipeline..........................................................
    • Experimenting rapidly
    • Continuously improving
  • Looking at the DevOps Results
• CHAPTER 7: Ten DevOps Myths
  • DevOps Is Only for “Born on the Web” Shops
  • DevOps Is Operations Learning How to Code
  • DevOps Is Just for Development and Operations
  • DevOps Isn’t for ITIL Shops
  • DevOps Isn’t for Regulated Industries
  • DevOps Isn’t for Outsourced Development
  • No Cloud Means No DevOps
  • DevOps Isn’t for Large, Complex Systems.......................................
  • DevOps Is Only about Communication
  • DevOps Means Continuous Change Deployment

Publisher’s Acknowledgments

Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:

Project Editor: Carrie A. Burchfield Acquisitions Editor: Katie Mohr Editorial Manager: Rev Mengle

Business Development Representative: Sue Blessing Production Editor: Vasanth Koilraj

Introduction 1

Introduction

D

evOps (short for development and operations), like most new approaches, is only a buzzword for many people. Everyone talks about it, but not everyone knows what it is. In broad terms, DevOps is an approach based on lean and agile principles in which business owners and the development, opera- tions, and quality assurance departments collaborate to deliver software in a continuous manner that enables the business to more quickly seize market opportunities and reduce the time to include customer feedback. Indeed, enterprise applications are so diverse and composed of multiple technologies, databases, end-user devices, and so on, that only a DevOps approach will be successful when dealing with these complexities. Opinions differ on how to use it, however.

Some people say that DevOps is for practitioners only; others say that it revolves around the cloud. IBM takes a broad and holis- tic view and sees DevOps as a business-driven software delivery approach — an approach that takes a new or enhanced busi- ness capability from an idea all the way to production, providing business value to customers in an efficient manner and captur- ing feedback as customers engage with the capability. To do this, you need participation from stakeholders beyond just the devel- opment and operations teams. A true DevOps approach includes lines of business, practitioners, executives, partners, suppliers, and so on.

About This Book

This book takes a business-centric approach to DevOps. Today’s fast-moving world makes DevOps essential to all enterprises that must be agile and lean enough to respond rapidly to changes such as customer demands, market conditions, competitive pressures, or regulatory requirements.

If you’re reading this book, we assume that you’ve heard about DevOps but want to understand what it means and how your com- pany can gain business benefits from it. This book is geared to executives, decision makers, and practitioners who are new to the

2 DevOps For Dummies, 3rd IBM Limited Edition

field of DevOps, who seek more information about the approach, and who want to cut through the hype surrounding the concept to get to the meat of it.

Icons Used in This Book

You’ll find several icons in the margins of this book. Here’s what they mean.

The Tip icon points out helpful information on various aspects of DevOps.

Anything that has a Remember icon is something that you want to keep in mind.

The Warning icon alerts you to critical information.

Technical Stuff material goes beyond the basics of DevOps. It isn’t essential reading, however.

Beyond the Book

You can find additional information about DevOps and IBM’s approach and services available by visiting the following web pages:

» IBM DevOps Solution:^ ibm.com/devops » DevOps — the IBM approach (white paper):^ ibm.biz/

BdEnBz

» The Software Edge (study):^ ibm.co/156KdoO » Adopting the IBM DevOps Approach (article):^ ibm.biz/

adoptingdevops

» DevOps Services for Bluemix (service):^ bluemix.net

4 DevOps For Dummies, 3rd IBM Limited Edition

This problem is further amplified by a major shift in the types of applications that businesses are required to deliver, from systems of record to systems of engagement:

» Systems of record:^ Traditional software applications are

large systems that function as systems of record, which

contain massive amounts of data and/or transactions and

are designed to be highly reliable and stable. Because these

applications don’t need to change often, organizations can

satisfy their customers and their own business needs by

delivering only one or two large new releases a year.

» Systems of engagement:^ With the advent of mobile

communications and the maturation of web applications,

systems of record are being supplemented by systems of

engagement, which customers can access directly and use to

interact with the business. Such applications must be easy to

use, high performing, and capable of rapid change to

address customers’ changing needs and evolving market

forces.

Because systems of engagement are used directly by customers, they require intense focus on user experience, speed of delivery, and agility — in other words, a DevOps approach.

Systems of engagement aren’t isolated islands and are often tied to systems of record, so rapid changes to systems of engagement result in changes to systems of record. Indeed any kind of sys- tem that needs rapid delivery of innovation requires DevOps. Such innovation is driven primarily by emerging technology trends such as cloud computing, mobile applications, Big Data, and social media, which may affect all types of systems. We discuss these emerging technologies in light of DevOps in Chapters 4 and 5.

Recognizing the Business

Value of DevOps

DevOps applies agile and lean principles across the entire software supply chain. It enables a business to maximize the speed of its delivery of a product or service, from initial idea to production release to customer feedback to enhancements based on that feedback.

CHAPTER 1 What Is DevOps? 5

Because DevOps improves the way that a business delivers value to its customers, suppliers, and partners, it’s an essential busi- ness process, not just an IT capability.

DevOps provides significant return on investment in three areas:

» Enhanced customer experience » Increased capacity to innovate » Faster time to value

We discuss all three areas in the following sections.

Enhanced customer experience

Delivering an enhanced (that is, differentiated and engaging) customer experience builds customer loyalty and increases mar- ket share. To deliver this experience, a business must continu- ously obtain and respond to customer feedback, which requires mechanisms to get fast feedback from all the stakeholders in the software application that’s being delivered: customers, lines of business, users, suppliers, partners, and so on.

In today’s world of systems of engagement (see “Understand- ing the Business Need for DevOps,” earlier in this chapter), this ability to react and adapt in an agile manner leads to enhanced customer experience and loyalty.

Increased capacity to innovate

Modern organizations use lean thinking approaches to increase their capacity to innovate. Their goals are to reduce waste and rework and to shift resources to higher-value activities.

An example of a common practice in lean thinking is A-B testing, in which organizations ask a small group of users to test and rate two or more sets of software that have different capabilities. Then the better-capability set is rolled out to all users, and the unsuccess- ful version is rolled back. Such A-B testing is realistic only with efficient and automated mechanisms such as those that DevOps facilitates.

CHAPTER 1 What Is DevOps? 7

The first exposure of the application to a production-like system should be as early in the life cycle as possible to address two major potential challenges. First, it allows the application to be tested in an environment that’s close to the actual production environ- ment the application will be delivered to; and second, it allows for the application delivery processes themselves to be tested and validated upfront.

From an operations perspective, too, this principle has tremen- dous value. It enables the operations team to see early in the cycle how their environment will behave when it supports the applica- tion, thereby allowing them to create a fine-tuned, application- aware environment.

Deploy with repeatable,

reliable processes

As the name suggests, this principle allows development and operations to support an agile (or at least iterative) software development process all the way through to production. Automa- tion is essential to create processes that are iterative, frequent, repeatable, and reliable, so the organization must create a delivery pipeline that allows for continuous, automated deployment and testing. We talk more about delivery pipelines in Chapter 3.

Frequent deployments also allow teams to test the deployment processes themselves, thereby lowering the risk of deployment failures at release time.

FIGURE 1-1: The shift-left concept moves operations earlier in the development life cycle.

8 DevOps For Dummies, 3rd IBM Limited Edition

Monitor and validate operational quality Organizations typically are good at monitoring applications and systems in production because they have tools that capture pro- duction systems’ metrics in real time. But they monitor in a siloed and disconnected manner. This principle moves monitoring ear- lier in the life cycle by requiring that automated testing be done early and often in the life cycle to monitor functional and non- functional characteristics of the application. Whenever an appli- cation is deployed and tested, quality metrics should be captured and analyzed. Frequent monitoring provides early warning about operational and quality issues that may occur in production.

These metrics should be captured in a format that all business stakeholders can understand and use.

Amplify feedback loops One goal of DevOps is to enable organizations to react and make changes more rapidly. In software delivery, this goal requires an organization to get quick feedback and then learn rapidly from every action it takes. This principle calls for organizations to cre- ate communication channels that allow all stakeholders to access and act on feedback.

» Development may act by adjusting its project plans

or priorities.

» Production may act by enhancing the production

environments.

» Business may act by modifying its release plans.

10 DevOps For Dummies, 3rd IBM Limited Edition

Therefore, you can view the DevOps reference architecture, shown in Figure 2-1, from the perspective of the core capabilities that it’s intended to provide. As the abstract architecture evolves to con- crete form, these capabilities are provided by a set of effectively enabled people, defined practices, and automation tools.

The DevOps reference architecture shown in Figure 2-1 proposes the following four sets of adoption paths:

» Steer » Develop/Test » Deploy » Operate

In the remaining sections of this chapter, you take a detailed look at these adoption paths.

Steer

This adoption path consists of one practice that focuses on estab- lishing business goals and adjusting them based on customer feedback: continuous business planning.

FIGURE 2-1: The DevOps reference architecture.

CHAPTER 2 Looking at DevOps Capabilities 11

Businesses today need to be agile and able to react quickly to cus- tomer feedback. Achieving this goal centers on an organization’s ability to do things right. Unfortunately, traditional approaches to product delivery are too slow for today’s speed of doing business, partially because these approaches depend on custom develop- ment and manual processes and because teams are operating in silos. Information required to plan and replan quickly, while maximizing the ability to deliver value, is fragmented and incon- sistent. Often the right feedback isn’t received early enough to achieve the right level of quality to truly deliver value.

Teams also struggle to incorporate feedback that should inform the prioritization of investments and then to collaborate as an organization to drive execution in a continuous delivery model. For some teams, planning is viewed as governance overhead that’s intrusive and slows them down instead of an activity that enables them to deliver value with speed.

Faster delivery provides greater business agility, but you must also manage speed with the trust and confidence that what you’ve delivered is the right thing. You can’t deliver software at speed if you don’t trust the accuracy of your business goals, your mea- surements, and your platforms.

DevOps helps to reconcile these competing perspectives, helping teams collaboratively establish business goals and continuously change them based on customer feedback, thereby improving both agility and business outcomes. At the same time, businesses need to manage costs. By identifying and eliminating waste in the development process, the team becomes more efficient but also addresses cost. This approach helps teams strike an optimal balance between all these considerations, across all phases of the DevOps life cycle in moving to a continuous delivery model.

Develop/Test

This adoption path involves two practices: collaborative develop- ment and continuous testing. As such, it forms the core of devel- opment and quality assurance (QA) capabilities.