How to get started Devops learning and approaches

For Devops Engineer in initial level here are the things in order for you (priority high to low), open source tools awareness and QA roles in devops process.

• Be Ready with Centos/Ubuntu commonly used commands set. You never know when you need what with these commands.

• Learn What is CI/CD and What tools are used in CI and tools used in CD (just tool names).

• Learn what is Git and Basic commands. (Because Git is most commonly used version control tool for your application source code management ). Sign up in github.com Build software better, together and learn how to push your code into it.

• Coming to most common CI tools : Jenkins is most preferred and open-source. Try to install it on your own. (YouTube is your best friend here).

• Once you are ready with github and jenkins. Create a simple jenkins build by Integrating jenkins with github.

• Docker is another high on demand Devops tool. It's container based technology. Understand this as deep as possible.

• Learn Kubernetes.

• Learn Ansible/Chef (configuration management tools). Try to learn these 2 tools. (atleast 1 is preferred)

• Jfrog artifactory. (artifacts/binaries management tools)

• At last Learn any one of cloud technologies like AWS or Azure (what are they and how they works - learning at least 1 technology is preferred with certification at the end).

AWS provides infrastructure as a service, where you can learn installing all the above tools installation using various AWS services.

Popular Devops tools

There are many tools in Devops. Depending on the projects requirement and standardization we have to pick the right tool.

• Most commonly used tools for source code management (as a version control system). Github, Gitstash, bitbucket, AWS code commit. Among above all GitHub is popular. You need to have git knowledge to use any of above tools.

• For Continuous Integration there are many tools in the market. Some of commonly used tools are Jenkins, Bamboo, Teamcity, Concourse, CodeBuild etc. Among all above tools Jenkins is popular and easy to learn CI tool.

• Configuration management tools like Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt.

• Artifacory management tools. Nexus artifactory and Jfrog artifactory. Here Jfrog is widely used.

• CD (Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment) tools like Udeploy, Code deploy, Jenkins

• Conatainer management tools. Docker, Kubernetes.

• PAAS services like cloud foundry.

 It fully depends on standardization and efficiency. Hope it gives you some idea how picky you should be in choosing from various Devops tools.

Role of QA in Devops

QA plays an indispensable role in any SDLC(Software Development Life Cycle).

There are two meaning to the word QA.

• Quality Analyst which is a profession.
• QA is also a term used for a stage environment.

Here is the explanation of both role in DevOps.

DevOps became so popular with the implementation of Agile by facilitating RAD(Rapid Application Development) in a better way!

But where does QA fit into the world of continuous integrations dominated by DevOps?

Well pretty much almost in every release! A Quality Analyst is required to assure the robustness of a product. Especially in the world of DevOps where the updates take place in an application almost on weekly basis. With so many frequent changes taking place, outages look to be very common. Outages are supposed to wreck the life of a developer and the manager. Everyone needs a quick hotfix when a service of a product goes south affecting more than a single customer.

But an immediate fix needs to be thoroughly tested before it gets migrated in Production. Developers and product manager would want the job to be done in a whim. This is where QAs need to step up and take the responsibility of evaluating whether that immediate fix for one outage doesn’t end up affecting any other functionality in the application. So just as much as a developer is needed to get rid of an outage by a quick fix, a Quality analyst is needed to prevent future outages to as many extents as possible.

QA as a stage environment is pretty crucial in itself for every successful web product.

Most of the times a web-app workflow comprises of 3 environments dedicating one for each team: Dev, QA a.k.a Staging & Prod in your release workflow.

Workflow:

• Developers are free to apply the fix on existing bugs in any way they deem efficient in the local Dev environment.

• Developers perform unit testing for the validation of the latest feature implemented by them.

• Once unit testing is successful, the feature is pipelined into Staging or QA for testing and quality assurance.

• Staging is where regression testing takes place to make sure that recent features are applying a fix to the problems without disturbing any other functionality of the existing application.

• Release date arrives and the features who passed with flying colours in the QA/ Staging environment are migrated to Production.

QA environment as a stage helps to:

1. Provide a sense of reliability – Staging environment helps in ensuring the reliability of our code, pipeline, infrastructure & overall product.

2. Hastens Disaster Recovery – If a recent release is causing disruption of service in your product then you can roll back to the previous version with a lot less to worry about. This is vital if you are offering a SaaS where one outage could result in losing a large number of valuable customers.

Why do we need a QA when we have a Dev environment for DevOps?

Dev Environment is ever changing – With Agile Scrum Development, the demands of end users are ever changing, increasing fluidity in terms of the state of a product. It becomes nearly impossible for a QA to find a time window for performing a complete round of regression testing. Also, the tools used by a developer could prevent a QA validation to take place in an appropriate manner.

Hope this will help you in understanding the relevance of QA with DevOps.

Good luck and Happy Learning :)

Source : Quora

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