DevOps: An Introduction

ARC Collaborations Hour

Patrick J. Roddy

2024-06-25

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ARC

Current Subgroups

flowchart TB;
    Collaborations --> _["Data Science"] & DevOps & Healthcare & HPC & MIRSG & WebDev;
    _["Data Science"] -.-> data_science_responsibilities["
                             AI
                             Machine learning
                             Signal processing
                             Statistics
                           "];
    DevOps -.-> ?;
    Healthcare -.-> healthcare_responsibilities["
                      EMAP
                      Hospital projects
                    "];
    HPC -.-> hpc_responsibilities["
               C++
               FPGAs
               Fortran
               GPUs
               MPI
               OpenMP
             "];
    MIRSG -.-> mirsg_responsibilities["
                 Medical imaging
                 OMERO
                 XNAT
               "];
    WebDev -.-> webdev_responsibilities["
                  CSS
                  HTML
                  JavaScript
                "];

A New Subgroup?

• What skills are there currently in the group?
• Monthly HPC Hour-like meeting?
• Area: DevOps label in research-software-opportunities
• Get the ball rolling (again) at TI (I won’t be there 😞)
• What training/skills do we want as a group?
• What overlap does DevOps have with the other subgroups?
• How can we collaborate with ISD to share training opportunities?

ISD Training

DevOps

What is DevOps?

Wikipedia:

DevOps is a methodology in the software development and IT industry. Used as a set of practices and tools, DevOps integrates and automates the work of software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) as a means for improving and shortening the systems development life cycle. DevOps is complementary to agile software development; several DevOps aspects came from the agile way of working. Automation is an important part of DevOps. Software programmers and architects should use “fitness functions” to keep their software in check.

What is DevOps?

Wikipedia:

… academics and practitioners have not developed a universal definition for the term “DevOps”. Most often, DevOps is characterised by key principles: shared ownership, workflow automation, and rapid feedback. … “a set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production, while ensuring high quality”. … At its most successful, DevOps is a combination of specific practices, culture change, and tools.

DevOps Lifecycle

Atlassian

Discover

Atlassian:

Building software is a team sport. In preparation for the upcoming sprint, teams must workshop to explore, organise, and prioritise ideas. Ideas must align to strategic goals and deliver customer impact. Agile can help guide DevOps teams.

Plan

Atlassian:

DevOps teams should adopt agile practices to improve speed and quality. Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams break work into smaller pieces to deliver incremental value.

Build

Atlassian:

Git is a free and open source version control system. It offers excellent support for branching, merging, and rewriting repository history, which has led to many innovative and powerful workflows and tools for the development build process.

Test

Atlassian:

Continuous integration (CI) allows multiple developers to contribute to a single shared repository. When code changes are merged, automated tests are run to ensure correctness before integration. Merging and testing code often help development teams gain reassurance in the quality and predictability of code once deployed.

Deploy

Atlassian:

Continuous deployment (CD) allows teams to release features frequently into production in an automated fashion. Teams also have the option to deploy with feature flags, delivering new code to users steadily and methodically rather than all at once. This approach improves velocity, productivity, and sustainability of software development teams.

Operate

Atlassian:

Manage the end-to-end delivery of IT services to customers. This includes the practices involved in design, implementation, configuration, deployment, and maintenance of all IT infrastructure that supports an organisation’s services.

Observe

Atlassian:

Quickly identify and resolve issues that impact product uptime, speed, and functionality. Automatically notify your team of changes, high-risk actions, or failures, so you can keep services on.

Continuous Feedback

Atlassian:

DevOps teams should evaluate each release and generate reports to improve future releases. By gathering continuous feedback, teams can improve their processes and incorporate customer feedback to improve the next release.

Conclusions

• Portmanteau of “development” and “operations”
• Many different definitions out there
• Everyone is doing some part of the DevOps lifecycle
• New subgroup = new opportunities
• Training opportunities out there
• Need to identify skill gaps/requirements
• Join the #subgroup-devops Slack channel
• Talk at TI!