devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: savaramravindra

  • Best of 2018: 11 Popular Open Source DevOps Tools Worth Knowing

    Best of 2018: 11 Popular Open Source DevOps Tools Worth Knowing

    As we close out 2018, we at devopsy.kinsta.cloud wanted to highlight the five most popular articles of the year. Following is the fourth in our weeklong series of the Best of 2018.

     

    Companies implementing the best practices of DevOps have demonstrated that they are more effective and flexible in implementing as well as designing IT tools and practices, resulting in higher revenue generation at a lower cost. For traditional organizations looking to embrace new inventions such as bitcoin wallet, the adoption of DevOps tools provides consistency, quality and efficiency.

    Open source DevOps tools are used as a way to streamline the process of development and deployment. The benefit of using open source software is that it is built with enhanced collaboration which can drive innovation and enhance flexibility in handling transforming markets and needs. Visibility into the code helps enhance overall quality and security, and also helps companies prevent vendor lock-in from proprietary vendors.

    Open Source DevOps Tools to Know

    If you are looking to accelerate an already existing program or just getting started with DevOps, below are 11 open source DevOps tools worth considering.

    Behat

    Behat is a php framework for auto testing the expectations laid by your business. It is a behavior-driven, open source development framework for php. This tool supports you in providing software that matters via test automation, deliberate discovery, and continuous communication.

    Watir

    Watir is a web application cross-platform open source testing tool. It is the most flexible and reliable tool of Ruby libraries for automating the web browsers. Just like a human being, this tool communicates with the browser so it validates text, fills out forms and clicks links.

    Supergiant

    Built on top of Kubernetes, Supergiant is an open source platform for container management. It is utilized for Kubernetes deployment on multiple clouds in a matter of minutes. The Supergiant API is used for streamlining production deployment. With the help of the packing algorithm of Supergiant, hardware costs can be lowered and the hardware you require with computed efficiency can only be utilized.

    Ansible

    Ansible automates various common tasks related to IT operations such as application deployment, configuration management and cloud provisioning. It is owned by Red Hat. It integrates with numerous other famous tools for DevOps, including Jenkins, JIRA, Git and many others. The free open source version of Ansible is available on GitHub. Red Hat offers three paid versions—premium, standard and self-support—with prices that differ depending on the required level of support and number of nodes in production.

    Nagios

    Infrastructure monitoring is an area that has numerous solutions, from Zabbix to Nagios to various other open source tools. In spite of the fact that there are much newer tools in the market today, Nagios is a well-established monitoring solution that is highly efficient due to the large contributor community creating plugins for it. Nagios has the capability to deliver results in different visual reports and representations.

    SaltStack

    SaltStack is the paid enterprise version of Salt. Salt is a highly flexible, powerful and intelligent open source software for event-driven orchestration, cloud control, configuration automation and remote execution. It helps DevOps companies by orchestrating the effective movement of code into production and keeping the complex infrastructures tuned for optimal application delivery and business service. Saltstack orchestrates the value chain of DevOps and helps to deploy as well as configure dynamic applications.

    Chef

    Chef makes it possible to manage both traditional and cloud environments with one single tool. While maintaining high availability, Chef promises to accelerate cloud adoption. The chef development kit provides you with the tools you need to develop as well as test your infrastructure automation code from your workstation locally prior to deploying changes into production. On the Chef site, many technical resources and a lot of documentation is available including various resources designed to help organizations transition to DevOps and scale their implementations of DevOps.

    Docker

    You can expect portability with Docker, which is transforming IT environments. The portability is made possible via its special containerization technology, quite often found in self-contained units. It packages everything than an application is required to run: libraries, system tools, runtime, etc. Due to this, the applications can function the same way irrespective of their deployment location. A part of Docker known as Docker Engine is a tool responsible for creation and running of Docker containers. Another part of Docker known as the Docker Hub is a service application based on cloud encompassing the concept of application-sharing and workflow automation.

    Git

    Git has become incredibly popular in the recent years for managing the source code. It has become famous, especially as a site, for hosting open source projects. Because of the ease with which it handles merging and branching, it stands out from other version control management. Many DevOps teams utilize it for managing the source code of their applications. It has great pull request and forking features. It also consists of plugins that can link with Jenkins to facilitate deployment and integration.

    Hudson

    Hudson is a tool for managing and monitoring continuous testing and integration. The key features of Hudson include support for various systems for management of source code, application servers, code analysis tools, testing frameworks, build tools, real-time notifications of test failures, change set support and easy process for installation and configuration. A huge library of plugins is present that further extend its capabilities.

    Puppet

    No matter where it runs, Puppet promises a standard way of operating and delivering software. Puppet automates deployment to boost auditability, reliability and agility. The products of Puppet provide continuous automation and delivery across the complete software delivery life cycle. The latest version of Puppet features Node Manager and Puppet Apps, which help handle large number of dynamic, variable systems.

    Conclusion

    The world of DevOps is full of unique and outstanding open source tools. The above mentioned popular DevOps tools can help effectively bridge the gap between development and production environments when compared previously. You can opt for the tool that suits your business needs and can instantly observe the difference in your business operations. And not only do these different DevOps tools function well individually, they also play well together.

    If you’re looking to build out your toolset, consider open source DevOps tools in addition to proprietary software.

    — savaramravindra

  • Continuous Integration Principles You Can’t Afford to Ignore

    Continuous Integration Principles You Can’t Afford to Ignore

    After recognizing the potential benefits from both continuous delivery (CD) and continuous integration (CI), many organizations have started implementing DevOps in their business operations. However, even today, many organizations don’t completely understand the core principles of continuous integration. Many people think that they are performing continuous integration as part of the DevOps implementation, but they actually aren’t.

    DevOps and continuous delivery are the market disruptors today and are providing businesses with a massive competitive advantage. Continuous delivery is developed on the tried-and-true practices of continuous integration. The companies that seek to recognize the advantages of continuous delivery have many times failed to completely understand CI concepts.

    The companies that perfectly carry out the continuous integration are following some basic rules. The working copies of developers are synchronized with the shared mainline once in a day or, most often, several times a day. An automated build verifies each integration to locate errors as quickly as possible.

    The CI process has been designed for embracing failure where developers can fail fast and fail very often, so they can locate and resolve errors quickly and early. The companies that don’t follow the above mentioned steps are termed as non-followers of continuous integration.

    Implementing Continuous Integration

    Continuous integration is a practice the development team follows and it provides real benefits for the whole organization. The engineers who are responsible for executing the practices of continuous integration want to attain those benefits and follow the most advanced practices their peers follow.

    Most often, companies understand how the teams implement the practices of continuous integration and then make decisions depending on this. The companies that do not follow CI principles are likely to face problems delivering functioning, crisp builds regularly. The members of the team will become disenchanted overtime and the initiative will lose momentum.

    People who don’t want change will get back to the traditional practices if they don’t observe any evidence of the advantages of change. You will have various problems, such as your team losing faith in implementation, unnecessarily wasted time, error-laden builds and projects that must be restarted.

    The organizations that lack the proper implementation of CI practices often face the cultural barrier problem. Engineers possess expertise in resolving the technical problems, but continuous integration requires a shift in culture and this is hard to achieve.

    You can get a CI tool and check almost all the boxes that apply to what continuous integration represents, but if you want to succeed with continuous integration, a transformation in how you work is needed.

    Instead of depending on tools for detecting problems such as a continuous integration error, the information can be automatically and independently verified through smart contracts on the blockchain, which is the technology behind cryptocurrencies such as the bitcoin wallet. The team will have a tough time implementing CI if its culture doesn’t change.

    Continuous Integration Principles

    Continuous integration depends on several major principles. Let’s deep dive into each one of them.

    Prior to checking in to source control, code must be built and tested: This can be done by compiling the build locally by yourself and then verifying that the stats pass. You can also depend on a VC/CI system that can carry out pre-commit builds. You can also utilize pre-commit hooks in svn to achieve something similar.

    Everyone should work toward the output of the CI system: The project managers and testers are also included in that. They must work in a way that they are confident on the working of build at some point and thereafter, every commit is an improvement. They should feel proud to showcase every build’s results to the entire project team and must react quickly for any reason.

    Functional automated tests must be carried out as part of the CI process: If you have the automated regression tests suite, chances are it is not difficult to hook them up to the CI system—and in the long run, it’s definitely worth it.

    Unless you are fixing the breakage, never check in on a build that’s broken: Post the original breaking commit. If you have numerous commits to a codebase, this leaves some issue in your CI system. If your commits aren’t coming fast and thick, this implies you are not reacting to the failures of your build and this is considered a serious issue. Also, the reason for the occurence of original breakage can be much more difficult to determine if other check-ins were done since the original one which broke the build.

    Make the check-ins exactly fit your needs: You may hate waiting for a long time for the compiling of a simple check-in build when you want to know whether you violated some major rule or have broken the unit tests. Make the check-in builds lightweight and run your code coverage and unit tests only. Chances are, you need not run all your analysis tools, code inspections and the automated functional tests every time there is a check-in. So, it’s better you keep the check-in builds light.

    Respond to the feedback: The CI system is a tool used to help steer quality and improvement as much as anything else. So, it should never be ignored. Nevertheless, it is easy to not pay attention to your CI system if the feedback is irrelevant. Working closely with the build team and the other members of the project is the solution, ensuring the build feedback is relevant and targeted.

    Other considerations: Never leave a broken build as it is; fix build failures as soon as possible. Also, every check-in must possess some value. Otherwise, what’s the need for doing it? Every check-in must be an enhancement of the last one. Here, the enhancement can be stated as an increase in code coverage, a bug fix or a new piece of functionality. Ensure you put it in your commit log if the improvement can’t be measured easily.

    Conclusion

    Continuous integration can be considered as a development practice that needs developers to embed code into a shared repository many times a day. The automated build validates each check-in, thus enabling teams to detect problems very easily. Continuous integration helps you build a solid foundation and enhances visibility enabling greater communication.

    — savaramravindra

  • Connected Devices and IoT: How the DevOps Approach Can Help

    Connected Devices and IoT: How the DevOps Approach Can Help

    The evolution of connected devices has brought challenges associated with the complexity and managing huge volumes of data. These devices also bring the need for a huge ecosystem of continuous software deployment across numerous application delivery endpoints, including a diversity of devices, mobile, web and others.

    There exists also the opportunity to unify operations and development, thus giving rise to the DevOps environment within the product engineering and IoT space—encompassing tools, processes and people as a single unit for more efficient and coherent working.

    DevOps accelerators and services allow intelligent automation and power the industrial IoT and consumer IoT companies with the capabilities of deployment, testing, build and continuous integration.

    It enables the organizations in connected health care, telematics, networking, security and surveillance, and home and industrial automation to accelerate their product development cycle, deliver significant cost savings via release efforts and reduced outages, enable operational scalability and improve code quality. It will enable the solution and product companies to accelerate their prototype to product cycle and decrease deployment time to days from months.

    Application reliability and availability are the ultimate measures of the success of IT. DevOps applies lean and agile practices all through the software life cycle to attain faster deployment and high-quality application development. Also, DevOps alleviates the rising complexity caused due to new computing trends including mobility, cloud and virtualization via increased automation. Now, let’s dig deeper into the importance of DevOps in the world of IoT and its applications.

    DevOps in the IoT

    The most effective DevOps transformations take a holistic approach, which means taking care of the entire organization in all aspects. This implies including all the constituents of the application, including quality assurance, operations and development teams, line managers and business owners. The constituents may also extend to compliance and security teams. The cross-functional inputs for software functionality and system requirements generates an ongoing feedback loop that helps reduce complexity and promotes engagement.

    Thus, one of the advantages of DevOps is improved collaboration and communications across the company. Deeper collaboration between quality assurance, operations and development teams follows an approach in which they all with collaborate with the client for designing a customized solution to fit their requirements and needs.

    Application testing should reproduce the function of a production system environment. Then, the DevOps teams can locate dependencies, gain knowledge on the functioning of an application when it is in the live environment and, accordingly, make adjustments to the compute environment. These processes become repeatable and iterative with automation and practice, allowing for more deployment, testing and development.

    Analytics and performance monitoring come earlier in the life cycle by moving the testing forward in the process. DevOps can develop performance analytics models which can predict quality and operational problems before deployment rather than waiting to acquire post-production performance data to examine what went wrong.

    These metrics can be utilized to establish KPIs (key performance indicators) and the production environment can be measured against them. The user experience and application performance can be improved as production metrics adhere more consistently to the key performance indicators. At this stage, sharing the data with business teams allows for adjustments to be made with less stress and faster, and accelerates the feedback loop.

    Continuous integration allows for better agility and collaboration to enhance code validation, which in turn reduces risks. The automated processes make for releases of higher quality that are easier to handle once they are in production.

    Treating the infrastructure configurations as code enables DevOps teams to handle provisioning on the fly in software and this sets the stage for the eventual migration towards a completely software-defined environment. With the emergence of the IoT, DevOps will become even more important. The precision of the services and software controlling networks, devices and sensors is critical as every device becomes interconnected in a software-defined environment.

    Conclusion

    Today, DevOps has become the main destructive force in the adoption of many technologies such as blockchain, which is the technology behind cryptocurrencies such as the bitcoin wallet. Owing to its substantial impact on business outcomes, operational efficiencies and deliverables, DevOps has become the major reason behind the evolution of IoT.

    — savaramravindra

  • How Python is Transforming the DevOps Landscape

    How Python is Transforming the DevOps Landscape

    DevOps is the combination of operations and software development which reduces or almost eliminates the disconnect between systems administrators who run the infrastructure and software developers who develop applications.

    During software development, when the Agile methodology is utilized properly, a bottleneck often occurs during the frequent operations and deployment phases. New fixes and updates are produced so rapidly in every sprint that the infrastructure teams can be swamped with deployments. To eliminate few of these issues, the operations personnel and application developers are asked to work closely to automate the code delivery to production from deployment.

    As DevOps is an approach for handling change and agility, engineers must master multiple languages. The Python programming language is one of the most crucial components of the DevOps toolchain. Many DevOps teams utilize it for building web applications for visualizing custom data, building custom utilities and more.

    Ansible and other tools are written in Python, which means you can build custom scripts or modules to automate your tasks, for example, or do other things.

    Reasons for Using Python for DevOps

    The accessibility and flexibility of Python are reasons why it is a preferred language for the DevOps toolset. If you are working in the role of DevOps, you must require an adaptable skillset; you must know how to work with multiple languages. For anyone looking to explore new tools and languages, and are curious about technology, the language can form a solid foundation, as it doesn’t require the commitment levels that a specialist language requires.

    In addition, it is a great scripting language, and scripting refers to automation. A few major configuration management tools, including SaltStack and Ansible, are written in Python underscores. This shows how useful the language is when it comes to orchestration and infrastructure automation.

    Python and Ruby are compared often, and with good reason: Both are highly accessible and utilized in applications developed by many organizations. They also feature in the DevOps toolset. We can do almost all the things with Ruby that we do with Python. But, when it comes to syntax, Python gains the upper hand, as it is much more direct than the syntax of Ruby.

    In the realm of learning to debug problems and code, Python has the advantage over Ruby, as it takes a much more direct approach to programming. Its directness and simplicity are invaluable if you are working in DevOps environment and agility is highly important.

    Conclusion

    As a growing number of engineers and developers take on decision-making responsibilities, Python can be the stabilizing language. And not only for DevOps—the language also can be used for developing blockchain, which is the underlying technology for various cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin wallet. As it can be utilized in various ways, it enables you to be open to broad range of technical possibilities. Python is the go-to programming language for the DevOps landscape.

    — savaramravindra

  • Integrating Security into DevOps: The Benefits and Drawbacks

    Integrating Security into DevOps: The Benefits and Drawbacks

    The efficiency of DevOps for your enterprise will depend on the level of security you integrate in it. The integration of security into DevOps is new to many enterprises, but is highly important because the speed of DevOps can make the apps in development vulnerable to malicious attacks. This can be prevented with the help of right security controls.

    Security and development teams must understand each other’s requirements and goals. Some might view security professionals as the ones who tap the brakes as the DevOps team moves forward. However, the job of security is to manage the risk effectively. To accomplish this, the security team must be integrated into the DevOps process.

    In many companies, this is a completely new methodology, and different structures are needed for different companies. The global security function is a component of the program management ecosystem by one security model. Security is integrated as an essential member of the development organization by another security model.

    Blockchain is the underlying technology behind cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and is used to secure the bitcoin wallet. The implementation of blockchain in a company’s DevOps process increases its agility and delivery efficiency, while the integration of security benefits an organization’s DevOps process in multiple ways. However, along with these benefits, few drawbacks do exist. Let’s dig deeper into both of them.

    The Benefits and Drawbacks of Integrating Security into the Program Management Ecosystem

    The program management function has a significant role to play in this model. It ensures that security is in place, and confirms that all the required specifications are documented and met. Security then carries out evaluations and determines what critical issues need to be addressed. In this security model, the security office can address the condition of a wide range of products that the organization delivers in a uniform manner.

    The drawback is that the issues related to security often are listed on a slide for review by executives and noted by the most important person in the development organization. Consequently, the list becomes a road map for “what we must fix” more than a prescription for “what we must make sure the product sticks to before it gets shipped.”

    The Benefits and Drawbacks of Integrating Security into the Dev Organization

    If the security team is a component of the development organization, they must maintain close contact with the global security office. But they can be much closer to the product development. This means they are closely working with feature teams and determining stories that should be planned into the sprints.

    These assessments cannot wait until the end—they must be planned into the first sprint that makes sense. Then, the resulting group of issues becomes technical backlog to prioritize into the following sprints. The goal is to produce applications that are safe for customers and have assessments that are known and can hold up to customer audit.

    However, the local security team must connect strongly to the global security office. Every security team that is a component of the development organization must rise to act as a single brain across all the products; companies cannot have any variance with respect to adherence to mandates, assessments, tools and standards.

    Where to Incorporate Security?

    To enable a continuous security mindset, security must be covered by automated test cases related to security in the continuous deployment/continuous integration process over the following phases:

    • Regular operations – near-real-time automated enforcement and utilization of continuous monitoring.
    • Integration phase – full sanity checks for external/internal endpoints, and make sure any new workloads do not break any of the security policies.
    • Infrastructure creation phase – test utilizing tooling such as serverspec/rspec.
    • Image creation and hardening – as part of the delivery pipeline, automate this phase.
    • Build phase – utilize code analysis.

    Securing QE and Dev Labs

    The final dimension is quality engineering (QE) and development, though they might be forgotten. Both of them have labs in which they make sure all the functionality performs, scales and works. These labs are good targets for intrusion, and security has a major role in the remediation and evaluation of the lab environment.

    Conclusion

    Adopting a DevOps methodology can instigate security vulnerabilities and new blind spots introduced by new systems. But fewer workplace silos and improved communication can help address issues much quicker. Today, security also can be integrated into DevOps using various technologies. It is highly essential to have security integrated into the process, no matter what method works best for your company.

    — savaramravindra