DevOps has created a lot of excitement in recent years and looks certain to make the same impact as Agile software development on the software industry. This is not entirely surprising; DevOps has largely been born from the frustration of Agile developers trying to work within the traditional confines of infrastructure support and delivery. Their attempts to find more efficient ways to deliver reliable, performant, and secure software to the end user has led us to DevOps.
DevOps initially came to people's attention in 2008 when the first DevOps day conference was held. It was organized by Patrick Debois; it brought together like-minded people for the first time to discuss how the delivery of infrastructure could be made more agile. Originally, the preferred term for what eventually became DevOps was Agile Infrastructure but the portmanteau of Development and Operations made for a friendlier Twitter tag and the term stuck. From here, the attention and interest in DevOps grew and today there are DevOps day conferences worldwide.
DevOps breaks down the barriers between the operations and development teams and allows a tight collaboration between these traditionally firewalled areas. The resulting cross-functional team will be able to react faster to the changes in the software requirements and deliver the best of breed solutions. This has led to a renaissance in areas such as monitoring and deployment, where the development team may once have lobbed a tarball over the corporate firewall to the operations department to install. The developers instead created a robust set of automated provisioning scripts to manage installations themselves. Likewise, monitoring has started to cease to be an exercise in testing if a port is available or if the server has run out of disk space (although this is still essential) and has become a holistic approach that takes into account the health of the infrastructure, load on the application, number of errors generated, and so on. This is only possible if you have a team that is truly cross-functional and with a deep understanding of the software they manage.
Defining what can be considered as a DevOps tool is incredibly difficult but the rapid increase of companies utilizing DevOps techniques has led to an explosion of new tools with a particular focus on automation, monitoring, and testing. Tools, such as Puppet, Chef, CF Engine, and Ansible have grown massively in popularity, thus allowing developers to truly define the underlying infrastructure using the code. Likewise, new monitoring tools, such as Sensu, have appeared that take up the challenge of monitoring ephemeral infrastructures, such as cloud-based services.
This book is different from most of the other technical cookbooks. Rather than keeping a laser-like focus on a single technology, this cookbook serves as an introduction to many different tools. Each chapter offers recipes that show you how to install and utilize tools that tackle some of the key areas that a team using DevOps techniques will encounter. Using it, you can quickly get up to speed with diverse areas, such as Automation with Ansible, Monitoring with Sensu, and log analyses with LogStash. By doing the further reading outlined with each recipe, you can find pointers to gain a deeper insight into these fantastic tools.
Chapter 1, Basic Command Line Tools, covers some basic but incredibly useful tools for trouble shooting servers and managing code.
Chapter 2, Ad Hoc Tasks with Ansible, contains recipes that allow you to use the powerful Ansible automation tool to run one off commands for server management.
Chapter 3, Automatic Host Builds, covers recipes that allow you to automate the build and configuration of the most basic building block in your infrastructure servers.
Chapter 4, Virtualization with VMware ESXi, contains recipes that show how to install and use the popular ESXi hypervisor to create, manage, and use powerful virtual servers.
Chapter 5, Automation with Ansible, covers the incredibly powerful configuration management tool, Ansible. These recipes demonstrate how to create a powerful and reusable code to manage the configuration of your infrastructure.
Chapter 6, Containerization with Docker, covers the increasingly popular world of containerization. Containerization is an incredibly powerful technique for distributing and running software and these recipes show you how to use Docker to create, run, and maintain containers.
Chapter 7, Using Jenkins for Continuous Deployment, contains recipes that show you how Ansible can be used with the powerful Jenkins CI tool to create an automated build and deploy system.
Chapter 8, Metric Collection with InflxDB, demonstrates how to use the powerful Time Series database InfluxDB to capture and analyze metrics generated by your infrastructure and present them in attractive and easy-to-understand formats.
Chapter 9, Log Management, demonstrates how to use powerful tools to centralize, collect, and analyze valuable log data.
Chapter 10, Monitoring with Sensu, covers using this powerful, scalable, and customizable monitoring system to demonstrate how to install, configure, and manage Sensu.
Chapter 11, IAAS with Amazon AWS, covers recipes that demonstrate how to set up infrastructure using the powerful AWS Infrastructure-as-a-Service. It also covers topics, such as EC2 servers, DNS management, and security.
Chapter 12, Application Performance Monitoring with New Relic, introduces the NewRelic application performance monitoring tool and demonstrates how to use it to monitor servers, applications, and more.
For this book, you will require the following software:
A server running Ubuntu 14.04 or greater.
A desktop PC running a modern Web Browser
A good Text editor or IDE.
If you are a systems administrator or developer who is keen to employ DevOps techniques to help with the day-to-day complications of managing complex infrastructures, then this book is for you.
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Where <interface> is the name of the network interface you wish to see the details of."
A block of code is set as follows:
[loadbalancer] haproxy01 [web] web01 web02 web03 web04[database] mysql01
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
[loadbalancer]
haproxy01
[web]
web01:04
[database]
mysql01
[all:children]]
loadbalancer
webAny command-line input or output is written as follows:
ansible all --sudo --ask-sudo-pass -m raw -a 'sudo apt-get -y install python-simplejson'
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Set Enable ESXiSSH to true and exit this screen."
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