Started of looking at the basic conflict between ITOps and Dev. In essence the risk adversity of ITOps, why its there and why its good and bad. First hand experience of this with being woken up many nights after a ‘great’ new release makes this quite pertinent.
ITOps needs to run systems that are tested and tightly controlled – This means that when a release is coming that requires new or significantly changed components ITOps needs to be included in discussing and aware so they can ensure stability in Production
Dev needs to adopts, trial and use new technologies to create software solutions that meet user and business requirements in a effective manner
Performance testing needs to be conducted throughout the development iterations and this is impossible if the development environments are significantly different to production
These improvements would make remove most of the real world issues we experience when conducting release deployments.
Performance tests:
How can performance tests be conducted throughout the development of new releases, particularly if these release become more regular?
Proposed answer 1 – is a ‘Golden Image’ – A set image that is used for developing, testing and operating services. This includes Apps, Libs and OS. Docker makes this more practical with containers.
Proposed answer 2 – is to apply configuration management to all machines (not sure how practical this could be).
Practical lab:
Installed Virtualbox, Vagrant, git, ssh, Packer.
Vagrant configures VMs, Packer enabled building of ‘golden images’.
Packer template Variables:
Builders take source image.
Provisions install and configure software within running machine (shell, chef and puppet scripts).
Post processors conduct tasks on images output by builders ie, compress (https://www.packer.io/docs/templates/post-processors.html). These post processors can create VMs for AWS, DigitalOcean, Hyper-V, Parallels, QEMU, VirtualBox, VMware
Lab instructions were pretty straight forward. On to lesson 3.
With all of the emerging technology solutions and paradigms emerging in the IT space, it can be difficult to get a full understanding of everything; particularly before developing biases. So… from the perspective of an infosec and ops guy I will list out some notes on my own review of current direction of devops. This review is based primarily on Udacity – Intro to DevOps and assorted blogs.
Why do it?
Reduce wastage in software development and operation workflows. Simply, more value, less pain.
What is is?
Most of the definitions out there boil down to communication and collaboration between Developers, QA and IT Ops throughout all stages of the development lifecycle.
No more passing the release from Dev to IT Ops
No more clear boundaries between Dev and IT Ops people/environments/processes and tools
No more inconsistency between Dev and Prod environments
