DevOps Beginner’s Must-Read: What is DevOps and Why is Building a DevOps Culture Important?

What is DevOps?

In recent years, more and more companies have begun to adopt cloud technologies and drive organizational innovation. When organizations embark on service reconstruction and digital transformation, it is highly likely that they will need to transform or adjust their existing version update and product development processes to achieve DevOps and modernize their infrastructure. The concept of DevOps in software development emphasizes collaborative and proactive communication between development and IT operations teams to make information more transparent, reduce conflicts, and facilitate efficient application development. This ultimately results in faster delivery of new features or products to customers.

For example, in traditional projects, the development team is responsible for writing code and conducting multiple tests before handing it over to the operations team for maintenance once it goes live. DevOps combines these two traditionally separate functions, improving project development and management cycles and introducing agility. The practice of DevOps promotes smoother collaboration between development and operations teams, with higher levels of integration, visibility, and transparency between them.

 

What are the differences between SRE and DevOps?

Many developers have limited knowledge of how programs actually work because their work cycle ends after packaging the code and handing it over to the operations department. The operations department is responsible for installing and deploying the code to all production environment machines while ensuring the program continues to run smoothly, often without a deep understanding of the program’s implementation details. This working model can easily lead to conflicts between the development and operations departments, giving rise to the emergence of DevOps as a new software development culture.

The term SRE (Site Reliability Engineering), introduced by Google, encompasses a set of principles and practices that ensure the DevOps team strikes the right balance between speed and stability. While DevOps defines “what needs to be done,” SRE focuses on “how to get it done.” In summary, SRE can be considered the practical implementation of DevOps.

 

What is CI/CD, and how is it related to DevOps?

CI stands for Continuous Integration, and CD stands for Continuous Delivery. CI/CD is one of the practices that enterprises implement as part of DevOps, and it is at the core of DevOps. CI/CD is a combination of continuous integration and continuous deployment practices. It can be understood as a series of integration processes such as testing, checking, compiling, and then releasing, deploying, and monitoring the project with every update in a software project. The emergence of CI/CD has significantly transformed traditional application development processes.

 

Advantages of DevOps

Faster Speed

DevOps emphasizes automation and continuous integration/delivery, reducing manual tasks for teams and enabling them to focus on innovation and quickly adapt to changing markets. For example, microservices and continuous delivery (CD) empower teams to take ownership of services and update versions more rapidly. Increasing the frequency and speed of version releases allows businesses to optimize products more quickly, respond to customer needs in real-time, and stay competitive.

Improved Quality

As speed increases, DevOps also enhances the quality and reliability of services. On the development side, more efficient collaboration and better tools help businesses address issues and improve integration. On the operations side, more frequent updates can enhance stability, thereby improving the user experience.

Enhanced Security

DevOps sometimes includes integration with cybersecurity teams, establishing a model known as DevSecOps, aimed at achieving faster, more reliable, and more secure software development and maintenance. By treating security as a foundational principle and integrating it into the culture and workflows of development teams, DevSecOps ensures security throughout the development process.

Higher Scalability

DevOps’ automation and consistency assist businesses in efficiently managing complex or highly variable systems, reducing risks. For example, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) uses a repeatable and more efficient approach to help businesses manage development, testing, and production environments.

 

Google Cloud DevOps Services

Google Cloud provides a range of fully managed DevOps services, including Cloud Build, Cloud Run, Cloud Deploy, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Artifact Registry, and Cloud Source Repositories, effectively addressing organizations’ CI/CD and operational needs.

• Cloud Build：Cloud Build seamlessly integrates with Google Cloud’s development environments, supporting developers in deploying containers to various IT environments, including App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Compute Engine.
• Cloud Run：Cloud Run allows users to easily deploy stateless containers, bringing serverless capabilities to containers. It eliminates the need to manage infrastructure and enables container building, and can be combined with GKE to run serverless applications on GKE clusters.
• Cloud Deploy：Cloud Deploy is the most integrated deployment platform, supporting continuous software updates for GKE, Cloud Run, and Anthos.
• Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)：GKE is a cloud-managed Kubernetes platform provided by Google Cloud. It allows you to create nodes, deploy, and manage containerized applications on GKE.
• Cloud Source Repositories (GCSR)：GCSR is Google’s git-based code hosting service, similar to GitHub, used for storing source code repositories.
• Artifact Registry：Artifact Registry stores images used by containers. Cloud Build automatically creates images when changes are detected in Cloud Source Repository and stores them in the specified Artifact Registry, with each creation leaving a corresponding version.

 

Further Reading and Reference Materials for DevOps

• DevOps Best Practices using Google Cloud (video)
• CI/CD on Google Cloud (video)
• What’s the Difference Between DevOps and SRE? (class SRE implements DevOps) (video)
• Google Cloud: DevOps Research and Solutions
• Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment with Google Cloud
• What is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)?

 

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