Following are roles of DevOps engineer.
- DevOps engineer write codes.
- Building an infrastructure that accelerate development
- process and subsequently deploy the developed product.
- Automation is key ingredient of DevOps environment.
- Configuration management.
- Cl/CD/CF is an important role of DevOps engineer.
- Managing cloud environment.
Even though the role of DevOps engineer varies, there are two things which almost all DevOps engineers will touch on a daily basis – automation and continuous integration.
Automation
Most of the tasks related to maintenance of infrastructure are still manual. Companies prefer to use traditional proven methodologies rather than automating the same process. As they don’t want to take any risk. But the fact is automated tasks will help in faster development and deployment of software’s, which means fast cash transfer from the customer account to the company account To grasp this point, consider for instance if system engineer has been tasked to backup all servers twice a day manually, he will waste his time in doing this as same could have been easily achieved by writing a script to automatically backup your server at some cloud facility. By automating the backup process, you allow your system engineer to focus more on critical things like troubleshooting the servers who are down due to some VM problem. Doing the same thing manually will result in overburden on your system engineer whose efficiency will drastically be reduced. This is just a very simple example to elaborate the concept of resource wastage by not moving to automation.
DevOps can be taken as an extension of Agile, as it reduces the risks that may arise due to non-collaboration between developers, QA and the deployment team. DevOps expand the scope of Agile principles, by recognizing the fact that high-quality software development requires continual engagement and feedback of all stakeholders including QA and operations specialists.
There are many things which can be done in an automated manner like updating your Apache Web server with new patches as and when they are released, updating versions of open sources software’s deployed on your servers. DevOps Engineers can automate the process of configuring servers by creating scripting environment.
You can run scripts on one node, but it will become impractical to run the same script on hundreds of nodes if not thousands. Scripting is not a scalable solution here.
So there is a need to automate software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment across a large number of nodes in a scalable fashion. This is where the configuration management tools such as Chef, Puppet, and Ansible come into handy in the DevOps world.
Continuous Integration
Another import aspect about DevOps is Continuous Integration (CI) which is a software development practice, CI allows developers to continuously update changes to a single repository, from where automated builds and tests are made.
A continuous Integration system usually involves a tool that keeps monitoring your version control system. Whenever a change to version control system is detected, the system would automatically build and test your application. If the build or test is not green, the system immediately notifies the developers to fix the issue right away.
Continuous integration ensures continuous delivery, as all code changes are continuously deployed to testing and production environment that follows the build stage. With continuous integration, Developers can improve their productivity as they are freed from manual tasks that are now done in an automated manner in CI; Errors and bugs are easier to find and mitigate as a result of frequent testing; Updates to end user can be delivered quickly and more frequently.
There are different products and tools which can help you implement Continuous Integration in your organization.
