Chapter 1: DevOps, SRE, and Google Cloud Services for CI/CD

DevOps is a mindset change­ that tries to balance release velocity with system reliability. It aims to increase an organization's ability to continuously deliver reliable applications and services at a high velocity when compared to traditional software development processes.

A common misconception about DevOps is that it is a technology. Instead, DevOps is a set of supporting practices (such as, build, test, and deployment) that combines software development and IT operations. These practices establish a culture that breaks down the metaphorical wall between developers (who aim to push new features to production) and system administrators or operators (who aim to keep the code running in production).

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is Google's approach to align incentives between development and operations that are key to building and maintaining reliable engineering systems. SRE is a prescriptive way to implement DevOps practices and principles. Through these practices, the aim is to increase overall observability and reduce the level of incidents. The introduction of a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline enables a robust feedback loop in support of key SRE definitions such as toil, observability, and incident management.

CI/CD is a key DevOps practice that helps to achieve this mindset change. CI/CD requires a strong emphasis on automation to build reliable software faster (in terms of delivering/deploying to production). Software delivery of this type requires agility, which is often achieved by breaking down existing components.

A cloud-native development paradigm is one where complex systems are decomposed into multiple services (such as microservices architecture). Each service can be independently tested and deployed into an isolated runtime. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has well-defined services to implement cloud-native development and apply SRE concepts to achieve the goal of building reliable software faster.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

• DevOps 101 – evolution and life cycle
• SRE 101 – evolution; technical and cultural practices
• GCP's cloud-native approach to implementing DevOps