Book Image

Learning DevOps - Second Edition

By : Mikael Krief
Book Image

Learning DevOps - Second Edition

By: Mikael Krief

Overview of this book

In the implementation of DevOps processes, the choice of tools is crucial to the sustainability of projects and collaboration between developers and ops. This book presents the different patterns and tools for provisioning and configuring an infrastructure in the cloud, covering mostly open source tools with a large community contribution, such as Terraform, Ansible, and Packer, which are assets for automation. This DevOps book will show you how to containerize your applications with Docker and Kubernetes and walk you through the construction of DevOps pipelines in Jenkins as well as Azure pipelines before covering the tools and importance of testing. You'll find a complete chapter on DevOps practices and tooling for open source projects before getting to grips with security integration in DevOps using Inspec, Hashicorp Vault, and Azure Secure DevOps kit. You'll also learn about the reduction of downtime with blue-green deployment and feature flags techniques before finally covering common DevOps best practices for all your projects. 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 (25 chapters)
1
Section 1: DevOps and Infrastructure as Code
7
Section 2: DevOps CI/CD Pipeline
11
Section 3: Containerized Microservices with Docker and Kubernetes
14
Section 4: Testing Your Application
18
Section 5: Taking DevOps Further/More on DevOps

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 or HCL 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.

Installing Packer

Packer, like Terraform, is a cross-platform tool and can be installed on Windows, Linux, or macOS. The installation of Packer is almost identical to the Terraform...