Learning DevOps

21 August 2022 · Filed in DevOps Infrastructure

Want to get to the next level? Beyond reading Stack Overflow. What can you do?

A bookshelf

The overloaded term DevOps, this article is focused on the infrastructure / programming and related roles.

Infrastructure

This knowledge area is all about the ‘stuff’ you need or dependencies required by your application. The basics are compute, storage and networking.

Compute is something that looks like a server, and it might even be a server. There are four types of compute

1) Bare metal

2) Virtual servers

3) Application isolation or Containers

4) Serverless environment

As we go down the list, each item is dependent on the previous item, the difference is who is looking after it.

For our purposes 1 and 2 are pretty much the same, just a difference in lead time (the time it takes from expressing the desire to have and provisioning). We are dealing with a base operating system and need to install tooling and server software. You need a knowledge of server operating systems, storage management, and should use a tool like Packer with a Configuration management tool like Ansible. For the principles see puppet camp london 2017

Containers also have an operating system and if they are hosting a web application, it is important to keep them up to date with patches and software versions to avoid breaches.

Serverless provides the most abstracted environment for you application to run, and requires little configuration to setup. More about those at Your Own Serverless

Of course the server is no good if nothing can talk to it. Networking, TCP/IP, Firewalls and Load Balancers are required to make the application accessible and safe from ‘Internet Nasties’. Routing, Ports and the infamous ISO Network model.

7 layers of OSI Network Model

Programming

At a minimum the basic coding structures including IF-Then, While, and creating functions. These are found in bash scripts and can be useful with Packer

I would highly recommend learning Python as it is heavily used in the DevOps world, from Ansible to AWS Lambdas.

Want to know more? Come ask me questions. You can find me on Slack.

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