Part 1 — My path to DevOps
“There is only one way to learn. It’s through action. Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey.”
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Make yourself better
One of my favorite book is the Alchemist. You can read it in any age to anyone and each time learn something new.
I have more then 15 years of experience in the tech industry, mainly in the telco and security fields, and during the years I understand that the possibility and option to learn something new is one of the best thing of my work. Though, it required one to push himself, invest time and efforts.
Recently I got the same feeling again, the word “DevOps” was humming over the air for a long time and I thought it is time I will truly get to understand this “buzz word”.
So I took the red pill and went down the rabbit “CI/CD”
How to learn?
Well, how should you start? I asked myself. There are so many options and methods you can learn: Udemy, books, Youtube or any other online method. These are all good, but there is no much interaction. It is just you and your laptop. So, I decided to find a local course and “jump on the wagon”. I decided to take a course given at DevOps Experts academy and leads by the very talented Danny Gitelman.
In my opinion, there is a lot of benefits to learn with other people, you get better understanding of the subject, you can ask questions in real time, but the most is you have the chance to meet new people and maybe new friends.
First rule in fight club
In this blog I will try to record my journey to the DevOps world.
I thought it will be good to blog my experience and share it with others.
It would also help me to summarize things I learn and focus on the better understanding process.
I set a few rules for myself:
- Try to be open about new ideas and new concepts
- Be patient, mainly about the things you already know
- Have fun!
With that said (or written) lets “break some dovs, ah bones…”
What is DevOps?
That was the first things the instructor ask the people in the room.
The common answer was it is a combination or “merging” of Development and Operation, but the suppressing answer was that it is actually a culture.
Atlassian, the masters of Agile, defines it as follow:
At its essence, a DevOps culture involves closer collaboration and a shared responsibility between development and operations for the products they create and maintain. This helps companies align their people, processes, and tools toward a more unified customer focus.
Well, I could fully align with this concept. There is a true philosophical idea behind sharing responsibility, but at the end of the code/build/product there is a “happy” customer, which DevOps team or engineer could make a great different with the quality of the product they will finally gets.
In addition, another important concept is the CI/CD processes.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.
CI automates the building and testing of your software.
CD is an extension of this automation that allows your software to be deployed after every code commit that passes your test suite.
What drags us to understand what is commit and Unit testing.
commit comes from Git (once again Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, made another great contribution to the world — more about it could be found here).
And Unit testing are the methods developers use to test their own functions.
This technique tests one function or module at the time and make sure it does not “breaks” or produce errors. In some organization user should not commit is code without adding unit tests to their final code.
First thing first
So, what should be the first thing to know, beside the philosophic concept of DevOps? That one is easy. You need to learn to code!
And the most efferent one currently available is Python.
The first task was quite simple. Write a python code that get’s input from the user and have the ability to call different python modules, use list and dictionaries, different loops, try and catch.
You can review it here
So, this is the first step in a long (15 weekly sessions) journey.
Will see you on the other side… in part 2
