Preface

DevOps is not a tool, technology, process, or framework; DevOps is a culture. Culture is an organization-specific thing and it evolves with a combination of people, processes, and tools for continuous improvement with continuous innovations.

The price of doing the same thing over and over again is far higher than the price of change. Change is no threat to an organization's culture. Using disruptive innovations only improves the culture. To improve is to change in the right direction, and to be perfect is to change often in the right direction by learning from the mistakes or experiences. And just for some fun... "Change is inevitable—even from a vending machine nowadays."

DevOps is not about reaching a destination and enjoying the beauty of it and ending the tour. It is a never-ending process of continuous improvement where we innovate things and plan to reach the same destination by enjoying the journey or process. This process may differ each time we improve and innovate, but our goal doesn't change! The goal is to achieve faster time to market with best utilization of resources in a cost-effective manner with the highest customer satisfaction.

This book emphasizes not only the technology but also different practices that the DevOps culture should include. DevOps is in its early stage. Deciding what not to do is very important, when, as an organization, we go in the direction of improvements and innovations. It is important to decide not to do manual work when it is repetitive.

In this book, we will cover all the key practices of DevOps, such as continuous integration, resource provisioning using containers and cloud computing – IaaS (Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure virtual machines), and PaaS (Azure App Service or Azure Web Apps and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk), continuous delivery, continuous testing, and continuous deployment; how to automate build integration and provision resources in the cloud environment; deploying a web application into Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, Microsoft Azure Web Apps/App Service Environments; application monitoring in AWS and Microsoft Azure Public Cloud; and load testing in VSTS and Apache JMeter.

The main objective is to manage the application life cycle. By automating repetitive manual processes, we standardize the management of the application life cycle and avoid errors. We also provide governance to application life cycle management by providing approval-based application deployment to different environments in Jenkins and VSTS, both with plugins or out-of-the-box features.

For continuous integration and continuous release (continuous delivery and continuous deployment), we have used Jenkins and Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). The orchestration of end-to-end automation and approval-based workflows is managed by Jenkins and VSTS.

Progress is impossible without a change in mindset, and in order to change anything we need to visualize the change. In this book, we will try to focus on the cultural journey in the land of DevOps using people (development team, QA team, operations team, cloud team, build engineers, infrastructure team, and so on), processes (continuous integration, automated resource provisioning, continuous delivery, continuous testing, continuous deployment, continuous monitoring, continuous improvement, and continuous innovation), and tools (open source and the Microsoft stack).

The main reasons to showcase processes or practices using open source and the Microsoft stack is to cultivate the feeling that it is not about tools; it is about the mindset! We can perform almost the same operations using any automation tools.