Book Image

Learning DevOps

By : Mikael Krief
Book Image

Learning DevOps

By: Mikael Krief

Overview of this book

The implementation of DevOps processes requires the efficient use of various tools, and the choice of these tools is crucial for the sustainability of projects and collaboration between development (Dev) and operations (Ops). This book presents the different patterns and tools that you can use to provision and configure an infrastructure in the cloud. You'll begin by understanding DevOps culture, the application of DevOps in cloud infrastructure, provisioning with Terraform, configuration with Ansible, and image building with Packer. You'll then be taken through source code versioning with Git and the construction of a DevOps CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins, GitLab CI, and Azure Pipelines. This DevOps handbook will also guide you in containerizing and deploying your applications with Docker and Kubernetes. You'll learn how to reduce deployment downtime with blue-green deployment and the feature flags technique, and study DevOps practices for open source projects. Finally, you'll grasp some best practices for reducing the overall application lead time to ensure faster time to market. By the end of this book, you'll have built a solid foundation in DevOps, and developed the skills necessary to enhance a traditional software delivery process using modern software delivery tools and techniques
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: DevOps and Infrastructure as Code
6
Section 2: DevOps CI/CD Pipeline
9
Section 3: Containerized Applications with Docker and Kubernetes
12
Section 4: Testing Your Application
16
Section 5: Taking DevOps Further

An overview of Packer

Packer is part of the HashiCorp open source suite of tools, and this is the official Packer page: https://www.packer.io/. It's an open source command-line tool that allows us to create custom VM images of any OS (these images are also called templates) on several platforms from a JSON file.

Packer's operation is simple; it is based on the basic OS provided by the different cloud providers and configures a temporary VM by executing the scripts described in the JSON template. Then, from this temporary VM, Packer generates a custom image ready to be used to provision VMs.

Apart from VM images, Packer also provides other types of images such as Docker images or Vagrant images. After this brief overview of Packer, let's look at the different installation modes.

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