Contributed by Venkat on 9 Oct 2013
Development and Operations – DevOps is becoming a buzz in the industry. Today, DevOps is bringing Development and ITOps together like never before. We, at Neev, being active practitioners of DevOps are able to glean tremendous benefits from our use of the same. The huge knowledge we have gathered on DevOps prompted us to arrange a DevOps meet to share this knowledge with our industry peers and also get enlightened from their inputs on DevOps. Thus was born an event to Demystify DevOps. The goal of this event was to explore tools and best practices that enable the DevOps philosophy. The DevOps breakfast meet was held at Neev Technologies premises on 5th October.
On-the-spot registrations were thrown open from 9.30 AM. After the guest participants were served breakfast, the event started off at 10 AM with participants from various technology firms and from Neev too.
After a brief introductory session where participants got to know each other and the speakers better and shared how DevOps is practiced in their respective companies, Anoop Balakunthalam, Head of the cloud practice at Neev began the first of the three scheduled sessions for the day.
The first session focused on introducing DevOps. The session covered the need for DevOps by highlighting current challenges faced by the development and operations teams and how DevOps can help overcome them. Anoop also spoke on the advantages of implementing DevOps both from a development as well as a business perspective. He made the session interesting by throwing in few real world facts like Paypal code making it from a desktop to production within an hour, AWS announcing over 150 new features and releases in 2012 and told that these would not have been possible without the implementation of DevOps. Participants were able to relate the concepts in the presentation with the challenges they were facing at work.
With the foundations for DevOps clearly laid, it was time to introduce the tools to enable DevOps. The second session by Emil Soman from Neev technologies focused on using Chef for DevOps. This session started off with Emil asking the participants how they were currently using Chef in their companies. The session aimed at crushing the wall of confusion between Dev and Ops and reducing the communication gap between the two through the implementation of DevOps.
Emil talked on how we can enable DevOps using Agile development practices and how DevOps enables businesses to scale within a matter of seconds. The session covered a detailed introduction to Chef which was an eye-opener to many participants and stressed on the need to use Chef. The session also highlighted the advantages of using Chef for DevOps briefly touching upon how Facebook overcame a problem through the use of Chef. The participants turned enthusiastic as they were introduced to the Chef architecture and various Chef-related terminologies like cookbooks, recipes, nodes, run-lists, etc.
The final session of the day by Ravi Petlur, Head of the Performance practice at Neev Technologies introduced participants to two more tools to enable DevOps and stressed on the need for these tools. Ravi introduced Splunk and AppDynamics and spoke about how they can enable DevOps and be used as monitoring tools in DevOps.
In the Q&A session that followed, the enthusiastic participants shot interesting questions at the speaker not only on DevOps and the tools used for its implementation but on how the tools help in monitoring and importance of monitoring for DevOps Practice. Here are a few sample questions asked by participants:
What tool do we, at Neev, use to accomplish DevOps? Does Neev Practice DevOps? How does chef help in DevOps? Why is it that Devops does not talk about Security? Can the same Chef recipes be used across different operating systems?
From the meet, I learnt that:
Neev is internally getting DevOps practice applied to all the projects and is executing couple of projects which are purely on DevOps enablement for organization.
It would be nicer to have something like a suite of test run just to check the vulnerabilities in the application along with the continuous integration. But security is one of the important aspects which is not talked too much when it comes to DevOps.
Chef is the tool which helps in getting the whole infrastructure into a version control system and hence it’s very easy to replicate, maintain, etc. It helps in getting the Dev and Ops understand and design the infrastructure at the same place.
Continuous integration and Code as infrastructure are important aspects of Devops and we use tools like Jenkins/Chef/AppDynamics/Splunk to accomplish some important functions like monitoring etc.
Chef runs are idempotent by nature, chef picks up from where it left off and continues from there in the next chef run.
The meet ended with participants informing us that the sessions were very informative and that they would love to attend such events in future too.
Visit us at Neevtech.com to know more about our offerings.
Tags: Agile Development, Appdynamics, aws, Chef, Cloud, cookbooks, development, DevOps, ITOps, Java, nodes, operations, Paypal, performance, recipes, ruby, SPLUNK
facebook comments:
© 2014 Neevtech Blog | Neev Technologies
Leave a Comment