Do you want to get started with DevOps?
Great! You’re going to make a great life decision. But maybe you’re not sure where or how to start.
That’s why we’ve put together this complete guide on how to get started with DevOps. Here are some easy steps that’ll have your team automating its way through deployments in no time:
1. Understand that DevOps isn’t a Toolset
DevOps is not a set of tools but rather a combination of people, processes, and technology. It’s an organization-wide culture shift requiring many stakeholders’ buy-ins to succeed. DevOps does not magically make you more productive – it requires significant investment over time.
2. Make sure Everyone is on Board
The second step in any DevOps transformation is to make sure everyone on your team is on board.
It’s important to take the time to explain DevOps, its benefits, and how it will affect their work. If you have a large team of developers and/or operations engineers who have been working in silos for years (as most organizations do), then they may need more time than others to get used to working closely with each other.
Whether this means holding informational or simple question-and-answer sessions with your coworkers, take some time early in the transition process.
3. Decide what you need to Measure and Monitor
You know how important monitoring is in DevOps, but before you can get started with it, there’s one more thing to consider: what exactly do you want to monitor? It’s not enough to just ensure that your software is working well.
You also have to be sure that your team is improving over time—that they’re getting better at building and shipping products.
And while this might sound like an odd concept at first (isn’t the job of an engineer or developer just to make sure their code works?), think about all of the steps involved in getting a project out the door. And then think about how each step could be improved upon.
4. Define your Deployment Pipeline
A deployment pipeline is a software development process that allows you to measure and improve the speed of your release cycles. It consists of five distinct stages:
- Plan
- Create/configure
- Test/deploy
- Release candidate (RC) testing or release to production
- Monitor and report
5. Start Automating Things
Automating things is the next step in the DevOps journey. You should automate anything that repeats itself and anything that is manual or error-prone, slow, difficult or boring. For this, you can check out https://codete.com/services/cloud-and-devops and let the experts handle this for you.
You can achieve this through a combination of tools and processes:
- Use automation tools such as Terraform, Ansible or Puppet to create an infrastructure programmatically. This enables you to make changes quickly without having to manually deploy every time something changes. It also makes it easier for other team members who aren’t familiar with your infrastructure setup (e.g., developers).
- Use continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) services like CircleCI or Jenkins to automate deployments based on certain conditions being met (e.g., passing tests). This allows you to test code before deploying it into production but also gives developers control over when their code goes live because they must approve each pull request before merging it back into the master branch.
- Create a pipeline for QA testing every pull request after merging into the master branch.
6. Implement your new Changes
Once you’ve completed the above steps, it’s time to implement your new changes. This can be a tricky and delicate process, as anything that goes wrong could halt or even reverse the progress you’ve made thus far. If you don’t have the right people or tools on your team, this could cause delays in implementation—and if there are any problems with implementing a particular process or tool in place of another one, the whole company will suffer immensely.
Conclusion
The key to successful DevOps is to be realistic about the time, cost and effort required to fully implement it. DevOps isn’t a quick fix but a long-term commitment that requires significant investment in people and technology.
Start small with some basic automation processes like building and releasing software, automating deployments, or using configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef, as they offer many benefits while requiring little upfront.
