DevOps Bible

Introduction to DevOps #

  • Definition & Philosophy
    • A portmanteau of “Development” and “Operations” - DevOps is a cultural and technical movement aimed at unifying and improving the collaboration between software development and IT operations teams. This approach breaks down the traditional silos between these two functions to enable continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD), and faster, more reliable software releases.
  • History of DevOps
    • The evolution of DevOps can be traced back to the convergence of several software development practices and methodologies, most notably Agile. DevOps represents the next step in optimizing the software development lifecycle by uniting development and operations for better collaboration and faster delivery.
  • Why DevOps?
    • DevOps is more than just a methodology - it’s a cultural and technological shift that fundamentally improves how teams develop, deploy, and maintain software. By bridging the gap between development and operations teams, DevOps promotes collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement. The summation of all this includes faster delivery, increased reliability, scalability, and collaboration.
  • Key DevOps Principles:
    • Automation
    • Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
    • Collaboration
    • Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

DevOps Roadmap #

A structured roadmap guiding beginners to experts:

  • Beginners: Study and understand fundamentals like basic Linux, shell scripting, version control (Git), cloud basics.
  • Intermediate: Dive into topics like Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud services.
  • Advanced: Learn and practice skills with orchestration tools (Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, and etc.), advanced monitoring, security, microservices architecture, scalability, and infrastructure automation.

Cloud Providers #

This is a light gloss over avalible options. Typically however when job searching you’ll see one of these three:

  • Big 3 Cloud Providers:
    • Amazon Web Services (AWS): Services like EC2, Lambda, S3, EKS.
    • Microsoft Azure (Azure): Azure DevOps, Azure Functions, Azure Kubernetes Service.
    • Google Cloud Platform (GCP): Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), BigQuery, Cloud Functions.
  • Other Providers:
    • DigitalOcean: Affordable cloud for small-scale projects.
    • Linode: Simple and affordable Linux-based cloud hosting.
  • Choosing a Cloud Provider: Compare based on scalability, pricing, and support for specific use cases.

CI/CD Tools #

DevOps is all about tooling, while this list is by no means comprehensive, knowing one very well will do you wonders:

  • GitHub Actions: Integrating CI/CD into repositories directly.
  • Azure DevOps: All-in-one solution with pipelines, boards, and repos.
  • GitLab CI/CD: GitLab pipelines, integration with Kubernetes.
  • CircleCI: Quick and easy setup for CI/CD pipelines.
  • Jenkins: The importance of plugins and scalability.

Containerization & Orchestration #

Containers can be thought of as a running instance of an image (image being your code + any requirements). You can use them for development, typically running just one instance; or you can use them in production, running thousands to share load. Orchestration would be the tooling that typically handles containers at scale.

  • Docker:
    • Basics of Dockerfiles and containerized applications.
    • Best practices for container security.
  • Kubernetes:
    • Cluster management, scaling, and networking.
    • Tools like Kubeadm, Kustomize, and Helm.
    • Service Mesh (Istio/Linkerd).
    • Resources:

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) #

IaC gave rise to benefits such as version control for provisioned infrastructure, repeatable deployments, code reviewing infrastructure, cost control, and more.

  • Terraform:
    • Automating infrastructure provisioning.
    • Managing multi-cloud environments.
  • CloudFormation (AWS - specific): Automating AWS resource setup.
  • Azure Bicep (Azure - specific): Domain Specific Lanague for deploying Azure resources
  • Pulumi: IaC with familiar programming languages (TypeScript, Python).

Configuration Management #

Managing systems at scale, the big 3:

  • Ansible: Simple and agentless automation.
  • Puppet: Large-scale infrastructure automation.
  • Chef: Automating server setup with recipes and cookbooks.

Monitoring & Logging #

Effective monitoring ensures systems stay healthy and avalible:

  • Prometheus & Grafana: Metrics collection and visualization.
  • ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana): Log aggregation, real-time searching.
  • Datadog, Splunk: Cloud-native monitoring tools.

Security & Compliance #

Security in DevOps aka DevSecOps is increasingly important:

  • Best Practices: Secrets management, role-based access control (RBAC), container security.
  • Tools:
    • Vault: Secure storage for secrets.
    • Aqua Security / Falco: Securing containers and Kubernetes clusters.
  • Compliance: Ensuring systems meet standards like HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS.

DevOps Best Practices #

High-performing DevOps teams will focus on these topics for measurable results:

  • Automation: From CI/CD to infrastructure provisioning, think end-to-end automation.
  • Shift Left Security: Integrating security early in the development process.
  • Observability: Moving beyond monitoring to trace performance issues and events.

Programming Languages & Stacks #

Here is a list of languages essential to DevOps, while some DSLs are different, having solid grasp of 2 or more here goes a long way:

  • YAML/JSON: Configuration languages for tools like Kubernetes, Docker, and CI/CD.
  • Bash: Scripting for Linux systems.
  • Go: Performance-critical cloud applications (e.g., Kubernetes is written in Go).
  • Python: Automation scripts, integrations with cloud APIs.

Podcasts, Blogs & Resources #

Resources for staying updated:

Systems Design #

In this section, you can explore how DevOps principles intersect with systems architecture, helping teams design large, scalable, and resilient systems.

Here are some key topics in our Systems Design for DevOps section:

  • Microservices Architecture
  • Distributed Systems
  • Scalability
  • Resiliency and Fault Tolerance
  • Data Flow and Storage Systems
  • Network Design and Traffic Management
  • Security by Design
  • Monitoring, Observability, and Incident Management
  • Cost Optimization

We will also review some Practical Systems Design Scenarios and touch on System Design Interviews as well:

  • High-Level System Design Examples:

    • Designing a High-Throughput Web Application
    • Designing a Streaming Data Pipeline
    • CI/CD Pipeline for a Multi-Region Cloud Deployment

  • Systems Design Interviews: In this section there are resources for DevOps engineers preparing for systems design interviews. Covering questions on designing scalable systems, failure management, and performance optimization.