Book Image

Modern DevOps Practices

By : Gaurav Agarwal
Book Image

Modern DevOps Practices

By: Gaurav Agarwal

Overview of this book

Containers have entirely changed how developers and end-users see applications as a whole. With this book, you'll learn all about containers, their architecture and benefits, and how to implement them within your development lifecycle. You'll discover how you can transition from the traditional world of virtual machines and adopt modern ways of using DevOps to ship a package of software continuously. Starting with a quick refresher on the core concepts of containers, you'll move on to study the architectural concepts to implement modern ways of application development. You'll cover topics around Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, Packer, and other similar tools that will help you to build a base. As you advance, the book covers the core elements of cloud integration (AWS ECS, GKE, and other CaaS services), continuous integration, and continuous delivery (GitHub actions, Jenkins, and Spinnaker) to help you understand the essence of container management and delivery. The later sections of the book will take you through container pipeline security and GitOps (Flux CD and Terraform). By the end of this DevOps book, you'll have learned best practices for automating your development lifecycle and making the most of containers, infrastructure automation, and CaaS, and be ready to develop applications using modern tools and techniques.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Container Fundamentals and Best Practices
7
Section 2: Delivering Containers
15
Section 3: Modern DevOps with GitOps

Immutable infrastructure with Hashicorp's Packer

The traditional method of setting up applications via Terraform and Ansible would be to use Terraform to spin up the infrastructure and then use Ansible on top to apply the relevant configuration to the infrastructure. That is what we did in the last chapter. While that is a viable approach and many enterprises use it, there is a better way to do it with modern DevOps approaches and immutable infrastructure.

Immutable infrastructure is a ground-breaking concept that has resulted because of the problems of mutable infrastructure. In a mutable infrastructure approach, we generally update servers in place. So, when we install Apache in a Virtual Machine (VM) using Ansible and then customize it further, we follow a mutable approach. We may want to update the servers from time to time, patch them, update our Apache to a newer version from time to time, and update our application code from time to time.

The issue with this approach...