How to become a successful programmer in DevOps based environment
INTRODUCTION
DevOps is the acronym for the combination of Development and Operations. DevOps encourages in adopting iterative software development, automation, and programmable infrastructure deployment and maintenance.
DevOps is looked as an infinite loop comprising the steps: plan, code, build, test, release, deploy, operate, monitor, and then back to plan, and so on.
How was DevOps developed?
Before the year 2000, most IT companies adopted the classical waterfall model, a linear approach for software development.
- testing the code. Developers had to spend a lot of time developing and integrating heavy pieces of code.
- QA engineers and operations teams, who worked in silos, spent more time
The result? A large, sometimes years-long gap between software releases, with frequent bug fixes and software patches deployed between each release
Advantages and disadvantages of DevOps
Advantages
- Faster development and deployment of applications
- Faster response to the market changes to improve business growth
- Business profit increased as there is a decrease in software delivery time and transportation costs
- Improves customer experience and satisfaction
- Simplifies collaboration as all the tools are places in the cloud for the customers to access
- Improvement in quality and simplification of flow of process
- Leads to better team engagement and productivity due to collective responsibility.
Disadvantages
- Less availability of DevOps professionals
- Infrastructure cost is high for setting by DevOps environment
- Lack of DevOps knowledge can lead to problems in continuous integration of automation projects
- Security breaches during the integration of DevOps in business organization
Good Programmer
Successful programmers have several personal traits which make them different and better from the rest of programmers. To become a great programmer, you also need to possess a variety of qualities that can help you stand out of the crowd.
Characteristics of a good programmer
- A Positive Attitude
A great programmer cares about your product success. They are positive, willing to go the distance to get the job done and bring their best every day.
- Supreme communication skills
Good communication skills directly correlate with good development skills. A great programmer is able to understand problems clearly, breaks them down into hypotheses, and propose solution in a coherent manner.
- Good time and Task management
A great programmer is highly reliable. They have a strong work ethic and show at meetings on time. An important skill in the ability to estimate the amount of time needed to complete a task, communicate this, and deliver on it.
- Quick learning ability
They are usually amazing quick self-learners. They have the ability to teach themselves new languages and technologies quickly and often do so out of personal interest outside of work
- A good team player
Another superb quality of premium developers is their ability to help other developers get better. They offer team mates help when they are struck, teach new skills to others, and write documentation that would help them not only in their organization but the developer community in general.
- Big picture focus
A great programmer does not simply complete tasks that are assigned to them, but rather they consider the broader impact on the system and user experience.
Tools and Techniques
DevOps helps in strengthening trust and better liasioning between developers and system administrators. Let us try to understand the different tools and how they help the programmers and enterprises.
- Build Automation –
An automated code is prepared to be deployed in a live environment where the tool used is tied to the programming language chosen. This makes the whole process faster, consistent, and more repeatable. Further, it also ensures that your process is more reliable than any manual build.
- CI/CD
Continuous integration and continuous deployment deals with frequent merging of codes and unit testing. Further, the deployment of small codes changes in a routine and frequent process is also a part of this method. CI/CD helps massively as it helps you detect bugs early and maintains the use of modular code the minimal effort. It also reduces the time to the market and introduces reliable market.
- Infrastructure as Code
This is usually to manage and provision IT infrastructure through code and automation. This is reusable, and helps in consistent resource creation and management. It is self-documenting and simplifies complex material like authentication and application servers.
- Configuration Management
This is the process where you can manage and change the state of infrastructure in constant and manageable ways. This way, you end up saving while also minimizing configuration drift, especially in large server environments. Configuration management also helps provide insight documentation on infrastructure.
- Orchestration
It is nothing but an automation that supports processes and workflows, like resource planning. It helps you save time and achieve stability.
- Monitoring
You collect data and present data about performance and stability of services and infrastructure, while also detecting problems. This helps faster recovery, helps with cross team visibility, provides more data to analyse for better root cause analysis.
- Microservices
It is basically an architecture that breaks an application into many small loosely collected services. This way, you end up reducing complexity and increase flexibility in choice of technology.
With the cycle time from ideation to software going live reduced, your organisation can capitalize on market opportunities, thus, providing you with a competitive advantage for your business.
DevOps Environment
Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams are no longer “siloed.” Sometimes, these two teams are merged into a single team where engineers work across the entire application lifecycle, from development and test to deployment to operations, and develop a range of skills not limited to a single function.
In some DevOps models, quality assurance and security teams may also become more tightly integrated with development and operations and throughout the application lifecycle. When security is the focus of everyone on DevOps team, this is sometimes referred to as DevSecOps.
These teams use practices to automate processes that historically have been manual and slow. They use a technology stack and tooling which help them operate and evolve application quickly and reliably. These tools also help engineers independently accomplish tasks that normally would have required help from other teams, and this further increases a team’s velocity.
Why DevOps matters?
Software and the internet have transformed the world and its industries, from shopping to entertainment to banking. Software no longer merely supports a business, rather it becomes integral component of every part of the business. Companies interact with their customers through software delivered as online services or application and on all sorts of devices.
They also use software to increase operational efficiencies by transforming every part of value chain, such as logistics, communication, and operation. In a similar way that physical goods companies transformed how the design, build, and deliver products using industrial automation throughout 20th century, companies in today’s world must transform how they and build and deliver software.
Opportunity in future
DevOps has a great and promising future. The practical application of DevOps is increasing day by day. Companies like Netflix, Google, and Amazon use it to increase the productivity and efficiency of their teams.
The trends and future of DevOps
- DevOps in the security field
The field of security is peculiar because the more you automate, the higher chances of automating problems too. To ensure the safety of the system, the DevOps engineer decipher the potential threats the system is prone to and brainstorm about them.
- AI/ML in the DevOps framework
The software development life cycle is revolutionized with DevOps methodology, cloud-native approach, and microservices architecture. Applying AI and ML to the pipelines can help you run builds and automation in a much better with closer insights a control.
- Automation for every company
Most companies are changing to be like IT company that provides some particular services. For every company, its software is the critical element that brings in sales and business. Hence automation of software deployment and infrastructure provisioning is key to all modern businesses.
Container technology
Container technology is evolving and emerging faster than before. Containers can be used to sandbox application for security and resource constraints. Research is going around using containers per user-to-user session.
Platform as a service
Platform as a service (PaaS) is a growing field with a lot of applications for DevOps concepts. DevOps has a lot of application in providing PaaS solutions in terms of configuration management, continuous security, and containerization.
Integration between Edge services, seamless security integration, and job as a code, DevOps plays a key role and containers will override configuration management which also requires DevOps to function.
Package or salary
DevOps programmers have a lot of demand globally. The better experience, the higher is the salary. DevOps Engineer salary in India ranges between 4.2 lakhs to 12.5 lakhs with an average annual salary of 6.0 lakhs. Countries like France, UK, Germany, Spain, Netherlands has high demands for DevOps programmers.
Conclusion
DevOps – culture, the process frameworks and workflows, the emphasis on automation and feedback- can all be used to improve the security program. Companies like Netflix, google, amazon are examples of it. These organisations have found balance with speed of delivery, and to build protection into their platforms and pipelines.
Programmers can align the developer code across the team and begin to iterate on CI/CD pipelines helps deliver applications faster. You can increase code quality and understanding by pairing developers together to help shorten the code review feedback loop.
Scope @ N9 IT Solutions:
- N9 IT Solutions is a leading IT development and consulting firm providing a broad array of customized solutions to clients throughout the United States.
- It got established primarily with an aim to provide consulting and IT services in today’s dynamic environment.
- N9 IT also offers consulting services in many emerging areas like Java/J2ee, Cloud Computing, Database Solutions, DevOps, ERP, Mobility, Big Data, Application Development, Infrastructure Managed Services, Quality Assurance and Testing.