Now that we have introduced DevOps, it is time to specify what are we going to learn in this book. It will be mainly focused on the Google Cloud Platform and the DevOps tools around it. There are several reasons for this:
- The trial period of GCP is more than enough to go through the entire book
- It is a very mature product
- Kubernetes is a big part of GCP
You will learn the fundamentals of the DevOps tools and practices, which provide enough detail to allow you to search for extra information when needed but up to a point where you can use the learnings straight away in your company.
It will be strongly focused on the ops part of DevOps as there is enough literacy in application development, and that hasn't changed in the DevOps world. Needless to say, we are not going to show how to write tests for your application, which is a fundamental activity to ensure the stability of our systems: DevOps does not work without good code coverage and automated testing.
In general, the examples are simple enough to be followed by people at the entry level of DevOps, but if you want to go deeper into some aspects of GCP, there is a good collection of tutorials available at https://cloud.google.com/docs/tutorials.
The book is structured in an incremental way: first, the Docker fundamentals will be shown just after a walkthrough of the different cloud providers but before going deep into configuration management tools (specifically, Ansible) and containers' orchestration platform (mainly Kubernetes).
We will end up setting up a continuous delivery pipeline for a system that manages timezoned timestamps called Chronos, which I use for talks for several reasons:
- It has pretty much no business logic
- It is based on microservices
- It pretty much covers all the required infrastructure
You can find the code for Chronos on the following GitHub repository at https://github.com/dgonzalez/chronos.
The majority of the examples can be repeated in your local machine using a virtualization provider such as VirtualBox and MiniKube for the Kubernetes examples, but I'd encourage you to sign up for the trial on Google Cloud Platform as it provides you (at the time of writing this) with $300 or 1 year of resources to spend freely.
