The DevOps Handbook - The Technical Practices of Flow

We begin our journey into the repeatable world of DevOps by taking cues from The DevOps Handbook, while Allen loves all things propane, Joe debuts his “singing” career with his new music video, and Michael did a very bad, awful thing.

These show notes can be found at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode136 for those reading this via their podcast player.

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News

• We’re very thankful for all of the new reviews!
  • iTunes: galTheJewishHammer, Ragnaroekk, Marcel7473826, rkosko31
  • Stitcher: Bicycle Repairman, BrunoLC
• Joe serenades us in song! (YouTube)
• Congratulations Allen on his renewed MVP status!

What is The DevOps Handbook?

• It’s a collection of arguments and high level guidance for understanding the spirit of DevOps.
• It’s light on specifics and heavy on culture. The tools aren’t the problem here, the people need to change.
• It’s also a book about scaling features, teams, people, and environments.

The First Way: The Principles of Flow

The Deployment Pipeline is the Foundation

Continuous delivery:

• Reduces the risk associated with deploying and releasing changes.
• Allows for an automated deployment pipeline.
• Allows for automated tests.

Environments on Demand

• Always use production like environments at every stage of the stream.
• Environments must be created in an automated fashion.
• Should have all scripts and configurations stored in source control.
• Should require no intervention from operations.

The reality though …

• Often times the first time an application is tested in a production like environment, is in production.
• Many times test and development environments are not configured the same.

Ideally though …

• Developers should be running their code in production like environments from the very beginning, on their own workstations.
  • This provides an early and constant feedback cycle.
• Rather than creating wiki pages on how to set things up, the configurations and scripts necessary are committed to source control. This can include any of all of the following:
  • Copying virtualized environments.
  • Building automated environments on bare metal.
  • Using infrastructure as code, i.e. Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Salt, CFEngine, etc.
  • Using automated OS configuration tools.
  • Creating environments from virtual images or containers.
  • Creating new environments in public clouds.

All of this allows entire systems to be spun up quickly maki