DevOps Practitioner – Building Culture and CI/CD Pipelines

Prerequisites

Before attending this course, students should have either of the following experience:

• As developers: basic scripting and software development skills
• As operations: basic sysadmin (Linux) knowledge
• Basic understanding of DevOps principles and methods is a benefit, but not a must

Audience

• IT development staff, IT operations staff, IT security staff, IT testing staff, IT teams implementing DevOps

Detailed Course Outline

Dev: meet Ops, Ops: meet Dev. Getting to know each other

• A team building exercise to demonstrate key aspects of DevOps and how to break down silos

DevOps introduction

• Overall introduction to the concepts, processes, and tools of DevOps, used as a baseline for the rest of the course. This module introduces DevOps values, culture, leadership and the DevOps value chain

The continuous delivery pipeline: an assembly and operation line for applications

• Overview of the continuous delivery pipeline, functions and the types of tools which traditionally compose it. Attendees interact for the first time with the actual tools used throughout the week.

Build something together

• A collaboration exercise to build something awesome together, share ownership and experience growing teamwork.

Agile for everyone: innovate and operate at the speed of business

• This module is a kick-start to the DevOps way and the story used to propel the rest of the week. It addresses how Agile is used for different roles, through different flavors (SAFe, Scrum, Kanban). The team will organize its agile backlog and Kanban for the shopping application they will own for the week, focused on business outcomes.

Modern application architecture: Micro Services, Test Driven Development

• An overview of key application architecture design patterns for DevOps. The team will begin their coding effort by applying a test-driven development approach.

Moving away from phased approaches: continuous integration and testing

• Each code check-in triggers an automated build and a certain level of automated tests, without interfering with other ongoing activity. The team will implement a new feature, going through all the steps in the pipeline for continuous integration and testing

Velocity meets quality: automated tests

• All test levels (unit, functional, security, performance and manual tests) are part of the pipeline. In order to achieve velocity and quality, the default is automation and the exception manual tests. The team will experiment test environments on demand for security and manual testing.

Iteration to reach perfection: minimum viable product

• Learning to deliver value quickly: building and prioritizing the product roadmap, estimating value and risk.

Dev, Ops and Robots: troubleshooting ChatOps

• Leveraging persistent chat rooms connected with the continuous delivery pipeline, the team will experience an application crisis and troubleshoot the issue collaboratively while chatting with robots.

Zero business downtime with automated and blue/green deployments

• As velocity increases, a new way of deploying the application is required.
  The team will experience zero down time automated deployments through blue / green deploy technique.

Business driven testing in production with A/B testing and canary releases

• Enabled through the continuous delivery pipeline, A/B testing and canary releases are key deployment patterns to maximize business benefits while reducing risks. The team will get an understanding of both and experience the business outcome of a feature deployed with A/B testing.

Making work visible

• Monitoring everything to make work visible. Dev and test dashboards, health dashboards, business dashboards

Optimize cost with infrastructure as code

• This module shows how to drive servers, storage and network capabilities as code, through the continuous delivery pipeline. Explore managing hardware as software with open-source tools for a programmable infrastructure. The team will add capacity to the web shopping application, enabling more business value.

The Chaos Monkey

• Instead of fearing production issues, we engineer the system to be failure-proof. The Chaos Monkey strikes by shutting down systems randomly in production. The team will create a Chaos Monkey in the production environment, design and manage mechanisms, which prevent service failure.

Enabling a trust and sharing culture, exploring the impact of team autonomy

• Another soft skills exercise to enable trust and foster sharing for its own sake and for the greater good. Examine the direct impact on productivity. The practice of a “Blameless” Post-Mortem.

DevOps IT topologies and leadership

• This module introduces IT team topologies and leadership approaches. The team selects topologies to support the adoption of DevOps. We assess our organization and practice value-stream mapping and learning how to lead change through iteration. From our individual value stream maps, we identify improvement themes and create realistic action plans. Discuss how to select the team, projects and next steps.