DevOps is the brand new rave amongst many. Organizations at the moment are desirous to combine DevOps practices reminiscent of Configuration Administration into their ecosystems.
When adopting a DevOps tradition, software program instruments are crucial, whether or not a corporation runs its providers on-premises or within the cloud. On this article, you’ll be taught one of the best instruments obtainable for configuration administration in DevOps. However first, let’s take a fast have a look at what DevOps is.
Let’s get began!
What’s DevOps?
DevOps is the results of integrating the actions of Builders (Dev) and Operations (Ops) groups to ship worth to prospects and create flexibility in software program growth.
DevOps focuses on how individuals work and collaborate by sharing their pondering processes and priorities to speed up software program growth. As a tradition, the primary thought behind DevOps is to optimize the features and effectivity of the groups concerned, whatever the instruments used. However how did this unified growth start?
Beforehand, the software program growth lifecycle had builders whose job it was to write down code as specified by prospects, with out configuring and sustaining an atmosphere for the required software program product. The Operations crew carried out the manufacturing actions and upkeep duties and skilled all of the nightmares related to the manufacturing section.
Think about managing a software program product you did not take part in!
Tough, proper?
The Ops crew was tasked with discovering bugs, managing the infrastructure dependencies and extra related points associated to the software program manufacturing atmosphere.
To shut this hole got here DevOps, which suggests a union of individuals, duties and all of the end-to-end processes required to ship a completely developed product to prospects.
Why DevOps is necessary?
When groups in any growth atmosphere rightly combine DevOps practices reminiscent of Steady Integration and Configuration Administration, corporations can reap the next advantages:
Shorter software launch cycles
DevOps serves the aim of sustaining a ready-to-deploy code base the place the DevOps crew can run obtainable software program variations at any time with out product failure.
CI/CD pipelines with all of the automation and testing in place be sure that a secure software program product is incrementally pushed to manufacturing and allow builders to attain shorter launch cycles.
Perception into growth processes
It may be troublesome to debug programming errors, detect safety threats, provoke rollbacks, and even reply to incidents if the event atmosphere is a black field.
Shorter launch cycles and steady monitoring in DevOps end in higher visibility of all actions.
What’s Configuration Administration in DevOps?
Configuration administration is all about automating necessary and repetitive actions in an IT atmosphere. Configuration administration focuses on duties that span a whole bunch and 1000’s of machines.
Such duties might embrace software program installations, upgrades and updates, patch administration, safety compliance, and consumer administration.
With the rise of container applied sciences and different infrastructure enhancements, system directors are discovering it a frightening activity to provision and configure IT environments with out automation instruments. Fortuitously, there are configuration administration instruments to create and optimize runtime environments.
Configuration administration instruments in DevOps provision requires Infrastructure by way of scripts/Infrastructure as code.
Let’s check out the next generally used configuration administration instruments.
Ansibel
Ansible automates infrastructure configuration, software deployment, and cloud provisioning utilizing the Infrastructure as Code service mannequin.
Ansible is a useful gizmo that DevOps engineers can use to attain automation throughout infrastructure, functions, networks, and container environments. Engineers broadly use this software for server automation and configuration.
This software reduces repetitive duties in infrastructure administration by way of outlined eventualities. A playbook, on this case, is a straightforward YAML script file that describes the actions to be carried out by the Ansible automation engine. With Ansible automation, the operations crew can create teams of machines that may be acted upon by outlined duties and management how machines run in manufacturing environments.
Effectively-known corporations reminiscent of Udemy, Alibaba Travels and Tokopedia use Ansible, amongst others.
Features
- Ansible Tower, a platform inside Ansible, is a visualization dashboard for the whole IT atmosphere.
- Position-based entry management (RBAC) permits Ansible scope to create customers and the permissions for the environments to work.
- Ansible helps each on-premises and multi-cloud infrastructure configurations.
Puppet
Puppet is one other open supply platform appropriate for provisioning resilient infrastructure. DevOps engineers can use Puppet to configure, deploy, run servers and automate the deployment of the functions on the configured servers.
Through Puppet it’s doable to treatment the operational and safety dangers in an IT atmosphere by way of Steady compliance. It supplies Home windows infrastructure automation, patch administration, and managed software operations.
Hundreds of corporations, together with Google, Cisco, and Splunk, use Puppet for configuration administration.
Features
- Extremely extensible and helps varied developer instruments and APIs.
- Puppet contains Bolt, a strong activity orchestrator to automate handbook duties.
- Puppet integrates nicely with Kubernetes and Docker.
Chief
Chef as a software in DevOps permits you to carry out configuration administration duties on servers and different computing sources. Chef’s method to infrastructure administration makes use of brokers reminiscent of Chef Infra to automate infrastructure configuration. Utilizing Chef in automation processes is simple. With a couple of clicks, a number of nodes might be operational.
DevOps groups outline ‘recipes’ for configuration administration. The recipes comprise an outline of the sources and software program packages which can be important for server configuration. Chef depends on Cookbooks, Chef servers and Nodes as important elements for configurations and automation.
Prime corporations like Fb, Slack, and Spotify have employed Chef of their ecosystems.
Features
- Chef is an agent-based automation platform.
- Chef treats infrastructure like code.
- Helps all working programs and integrates with any cloud know-how.
- Chef options Chef analytics for monitoring adjustments going down on the Chef server.
Salt pile
Saltstack or just salt is a scalable configuration administration and orchestration software. DevOps groups use salt to handle IT environments reminiscent of knowledge facilities by way of event-driven orchestration and distant configuration.
The Salt configuration administration framework depends on states and configuration recordsdata to point out how an IT infrastructure is provisioned and deployed. The configuration recordsdata describe infrastructure packages to put in, providers to start out or cease, consumer and consumer creation processes, and plenty of different duties required when provisioning an IT atmosphere.
Features
- Salt Cloud platform for provisioning programs within the cloud.
- Helps each agent-based and agentless node monitoring.
- Helps each *NIX and Home windows working programs.
CF engine
CFEngine is a extremely scalable platform for automated administration of your IT infrastructure. Groups can carry out bodily and digital infrastructure provisioning, patch administration, entry management, consumer administration, and system safety all from one place with CFEngine.
With CFEngine, autonomous brokers are always at work to constantly monitor, restore, replace, and restore an IT infrastructure. Steady system checks and automatic restoration in CFEngine guarantee reliability and consistency throughout an infrastructure.
Features
- Very versatile because of the ‘write as soon as use repeatedly’ configuration scheme.
- Has CFEngine Enterprise Mission Portal, a central dashboard platform for visibility and real-time monitoring of IT programs.
- Use light-weight automation brokers inside the WebScale platform to configure and handle varied nodes.
Configuration
As we all know, configuration administration is about automating necessary and repetitive actions in an IT atmosphere. And Configu suits proper into the definition. Configu is a configuration administration software that can relieve all builders and managers.
Builders have nice alternatives by way of Configu to extend collaboration and enhance their productiveness. As well as, managers locally discover it very dependable and secure.
Features
- Automated configuration administration
- Improved developer collaboration
- Dependable and secure for managers
- Open-source configuration format
Configu permits you to create a configuration within the open supply format. As well as, it permits automation with superior administration capabilities reminiscent of testing, visualization, monitoring, and safety. I’d additionally like to focus on an important issue from the implementation facet of Configu: it permits you to streamline processes with only one command. So give it a strive!
Conclusion
One of the simplest ways to seek out one of the best instruments on your wants is to strive them out. What works for others might not give you the results you want, so give them a attempt to see the way it works and the way it helps your group hold configuration constant and safe.