According to Amazon AWS, "DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity."
DevOps follows specific practices that include:
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Delivery
- Microservices
- Infrastructure as Code
- Monitoring and Logging
- Communication and Collaboration
These practices can further be categorized into functions that work to align the practices into a coherent organizational process flow:
- Infrastructure automation
- Configuration management
- Deployment automation
- Version control
- Performance management
- Log management
- Monitoring
- Security and compliance
Ultimately, the success of the DevOps approach relies upon the importance of automation:
Automation is a fundamental principle in DevOps practices. It starts from code generation on developers' machines and extends to monitoring applications and systems in production. Regardless of unique business operational practices, automation is crucial for achieving speed, consistency, accuracy, reliability, and increased delivery frequency. The actual implementation of DevOps practices relies on the tools used to perform them. These tools align with the function categories, and some can even satisfy multiple categories.
Here are examples of tools that support various DevOps function categories:
- Infrastructure Automation: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Google Cloud Deployment Manager, Azure Resource Manager
- Configuration Management: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack
- Deployment Automation: Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab CI/CD, Travis CI
- Version Control: Git, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket
- Performance Management: New Relic, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Datadog
- Log Management: ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), Splunk, Graylog, Sumo Logic
- Monitoring: Prometheus, Nagios, Zabbix, Datadog
- Security and Compliance: SonarQube, OWASP ZAP, Nessus, HashiCorp Vault
It's important to note that there are many tools available in each category, and the choice of tool depends on specific requirements, preferences, and the technology stack being used. Proper implementation of these tools enhances productivity and enables efficient DevOps workflows across large teams and extensive IT infrastructures, leading to the delivery and security of applications and services.
