What’s Next in DevOps: 5 Trends to Watch

Posted on October 11, 2017October 18, 2019 by Idexcel Technologies

The term “DevOps” is typically credited to this 2008 presentation on agile infrastructure and operations. Now ubiquitous in IT vocabulary, the mashup word is less than 10 years old: We’re still figuring out this modern way of working in IT.

Sure, people who have been “doing DevOps” for years have accrued plenty of wisdom along the way. But most DevOps environments – and the mix of people and culture, process and methodology, and tools and technology – are far from mature.

More change is coming. That’s kind of the whole point. “DevOps is a process, an algorithm,” says Robert Reeves, CTO at Datical. “Its entire purpose is to change and evolve over time.”

What should we expect next? Here are some key trends to watch, according to DevOps experts.

Doing DevOps Right

Posted on October 3, 2017October 18, 2019 by Idexcel Technologies

DevOps has become the talk of the town these days. With a lot of organizations beginning to employ the tactics on a day to day basis, there are a lot of options to explore from. While DevOps provides organizations an edge over the competition, the transition is not painless or easy.

How Can a Company Know if They are Doing DevOps Right?

Define Strategies: Strategies related to infrastructure use will help an organization gauge their resource requirements, thereby helping them capitalize on their needs and wants.

Implementation in Stages: In order to make DevOps a success story for your organization to live by, it is best to avoid implementing the techniques in the whole organization in the same go. Do it in pieces to measure the success in a step by step situation.

Cost Management: Define a process which showcases the costs involved in the deployment phase. Expenses need to be mapped to each process, so that there is a detailed costing procedure available to every process, making DevOps clear and concise.

Rapid Release Cycles: Release management encompasses the process of managing, scheduling and controlling software’s production phase and guiding it through the various stages, which includes software testing and software deployment.

Seamless Integration on Different Platforms: Software development is all about seamless integration and deployment. This is not limited to cross platform integration only. This includes maintaining uniformity in all possible stages, from beginning to end, wherein the software has to be tested effectively in order to achieve operational excellence.

Application Life Cycle Management: The software production cycle begins with requirements gathering, and ends with the software hitting the market post production. The whole procedure is dependent on rigorous testing using effective tools, which helps accelerate the operations process.

Performance Monitoring: Through performance testing and monitoring, a product’s functionality can be gauged, to achieve the desired results. Performance monitoring includes making sure no external factors are able to influence the working of the product or software.

Continuous Delivery: The process of continuous delivery can be manual as well as automated. User acceptance testing enables automation, which can ease out the product delivery.

Helping Organizations Develop DevOps the Right Way

Using Social Media: Employees can grasp the various nuances of DevOps through social media, which makes it all the easier to be abreast of the changes and the upcoming trends.

Conference Sessions and Events: DevOps themes can go a long way in educating employees of the trends prevailing in the technical industry. Companies and organizations should concentrate on bringing employees together to make sure the concepts of DevOps are done right.

Leverage Log Analysis: It’s important to notice a trend of failures and follow it to make amends. This trend would often involve a common point between users, decision makers as well as developers and implementers.

Working in Tandem with Operations and Developers: Understand the problem, and develop the solution. This is the key to successful implementation. When operations provide the problems, the developers need to find the solution and make sure it is implemented in the right manner. While ops have the burden of maintaining the up time, their focus can dwindle from the right approach, which is why it’s essential to let the developers work on what’s important.

Use Data for Analysis and Feedback: Log analysis data should be the common point for all people out there in an organization. Since data talks majorly about the loopholes in a process, it can go a long way in simplifying the problems and helping implement the solutions effectively.

Commitment to DevOps can really pay off, if implemented correctly. Since people form the backbone of DevOps strategy, they should be kept in focus at all times. Developers are needed to take onus of their product development so that quality does not take a hit. Once all the strategies are in place, companies and organizations alike can define and measure their DevOps procedures and identify the gaps which need to be plugged in eventually.

DevOps Tools Training Sparks IT productivity

Posted on August 16, 2017October 18, 2019 by Idexcel Technologies

Enterprises have a new weapon to combat the IT skills shortage where new hiring and training practices fall short.

Most IT pros agree the fastest path to IT burnout is what Amazon engineers have termed “undifferentiated heavy lifting,” which is repetitive and uninteresting work that has little potential for wider impact beyond keeping the lights on. DevOps tools training, which involves IT automation practices, can reduce or eliminate such mundane work and can compensate against staff shortages and employee attrition.
Read more..

Top 9 Open Source DevOps Tools You Must Know

Posted on May 24, 2017October 18, 2019 by Idexcel Technologies

There was a time when developers and operations were always gnawing at each other’s throats. The production code was never updated on time, while the administrators always got irked over the ever piling server requests. As the battle ensued, it became all the more necessary to come up with an appropriate tool box, which could help rid both the parties of these battle lines.

This is where DevOps comes into the picture. DevOps is well configured to provide services which range from application portability to configuration management. While the list of services doesn’t end, it definitely makes life much easier for the end users. However, without the right kind of tools, even DevOps can’t make it to their destined uses.

Here are some of the names which stand out amongst the list of DevOps tools:

Chef:
Like the gourmet world, Chef is synonymous with the term recipes. It is a system and Cloud infrastructure, which automates an entire building, by deploying and managing infrastructure through short repeatable scripts, often termed as recipes. But the real power comes into play, when pluggable configuration modules are employed. Chef can be used to ease out complex tasks, perform automations, which can often prove to be heavy on resources, efforts and time.

Docker:
With Docker, you can expect portability, which is made possible through its unique containerization technology, often found in self contained units. The tool consists of a Docker Engine, a lightweight runtime and packaging tool and Docker Hub, which is essentially a cloud based service application, encompassing the concept of application sharing and workflow automation.

Puppet:
Puppet Enterprise, a unit of Puppet Labs, allows data orchestration by providing automation configurations and machine management. The latest version, Puppet 3.7, features Puppet Apps, and Node Manager, which helps manage large number of variable, dynamic systems. Puppet is also available as an open source software.

Jenkins:
Being an open source standard for managing DevOps, Jenkins allows everything, right from delivering code to production to source code management. Since it is a pluggable, de facto engine, it proves to be an ecosystem with more than 1100 plugins for the users. Jenkins has proved to be a continuous delivery and a continuous integration for developers.

ELK:
ELK, by Elastic, is a NoSQL database that is made on the Lucene search engine. ELK Stack is not just one tool, but a combination of 3 different tools rolled into one. ELK stands for Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana; all three are open source projects, which are individually maintained by Elastic.

Cassandra:
Apache Cassandra is considered to be a good choice, when you need scalability, availability without worrying about performance. Through this tool, data is automatically replicated between multiple nodes. While single system replication is supported, one can also perform multiple systems replication. Thankfully, there are no single points of failure, which makes it a great devops tool.

Ansible:
Conceived by Michael Dehaan, Ansible was released in the year 2012. It is a configuration management platform which leverages Python to configure systems. The systems are expressed in the YAML format, which is a construct, commonly known as a Playbook. A Playbook has been tweaked to provide configurations for single and multiple systems at the same time.

Splunk:
If real time issue fixing is what you are looking for, then Splunk is your first time solution. It allows visualization of data, while taking cues from production environments. All this can be done without requiring access to production machines. With Splunk, users can access and embrace processes, which include successful integration and deployment.

SaltStack:
SaltStack helps in data automation, cloud building, server provisioning and application configuration. Since this tool is an event drive automation tool, it enables automation within the DevOps workflow. It features around 200 virtual machines, each of which is capable of running in the staging and production environment.

These were some of the top 9 DevOps tools which are helping bridge the gaps between production and development environments. Choose the one which suits your business needs and see the difference in your business operations instantly.