CI/CD – DevopsCurry

Sustainable DevOps: Optimizing DevOps For The Planet

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 06:02:17 +0000

Detail Information About Sustainable DevOps

Introduction & History Of Sustainable DevOps

Sustainable DevOps is a concept that combines the principles of sustainable development with the practices of DevOps. DevOps, a blend of “Development” and “Operations,” is a methodology aimed at improving collaboration between software developers and IT operations. It focuses on automating and integrating the processes of software development and IT operations to increase the speed and reliability of software delivery.

Sustainability in this context refers to practices that ensure long-term environmental, social, and economic health. Sustainable DevOps aims to make the process of developing, deploying, and maintaining software more environmentally friendly, cost-effective, and socially responsible.

DevOps emerged in the late 2000s as a response to the traditional separation between software development and IT operations. This separation often led to inefficiencies and slow release cycles. DevOps sought to break down these silos by fostering a culture of collaboration, continuous integration, and continuous delivery (CI/CD). By the mid-2010s, organizations began to recognize the importance of incorporating sustainability into their DevOps practices.

Environmental impacts of Software Development

You use a variety of software’s and applications throughout the day. Each software drains your mobile’s or PC’s battery at different speeds. To keep your battery and your device working, you need to charge or power them with electricity. Now unless you are getting it from solar panels or windmills, high chances are that the electricity you use comes from burning fossil fuels. These fossil fuels, as you must have read a hundred times in your school, are limited and cause pollution when burnt. In short, the software’s that you are using is directly linked to pollution, or in technical terms, carbon emission.

The carbon footprint of an individual software or the software carbon footprint is affected by the software’s code quality, architecture, network usage, etc.

Moreover, the devices and hardware that runs the software also emits large amounts of carbon during its manufacturing. After their life ends, they are dumped in landfill while only a minimal percentage of them gets recycled. This is called embodied carbon (or embedded carbon) which is the amount carbon emitted during the manufacturing and disposal of a device. This means that even if a hardware is not using much electricity, it has already contributed to the carbon footprint during its manufacturing. An FPT TV and desktop computers have a much higher embodied carbon while a smartphone has the least.

Image Credit: https://learn.greensoftware.foundation/assets/images/17_embodioed_carbon-9e6e805fdc5d2381d34fb0b391618e11.png

What is Sustainable DevOps?

Sustainable DevOps, also referred to as Green DevOps or DevGreenOps, is a DevOps approach that focuses on reducing the environmental impact of software development processes. In other words, you can say it is an ideology that sees DevOps as the key to reduce the carbon footprint of the IT development industry. It involves the use of eco-friendly DevOps practices and instilling a sense of responsibility among the company’s teams.

In another terms, it refers to the practice of integrating sustainability principles into the DevOps processes, aiming to create software and manage IT infrastructure in an environmentally friendly way. This involves optimizing resource usage, reducing energy consumption, and minimizing the carbon footprint of IT operations.

Sustainable DevOps practices

Improving code efficiency

Poorly written or longer codes can increase the energy consumption of software and ultimately lead to more carbon emissions.

Green coding is defined by Stl Partners as “programming code that has been produced and written in a way that minimizes the energy consumption of software, thereby limiting the potential environmental impact.” Lazy loading (loading only those resources that are required at the moment) and caching mechanisms (locally storing frequently accessed data) are some green coding practices that help to save energy.

Using cloud services

Cloud computing allows businesses to use computing resources (servers, storage, infrastructure, etc.) whenever required without relying on physical hardware. In addition to being cost-efficient, cloud computing has numerous environmental benefits as well.

Firstly, it reduces the need for physical hardware that, as discussed before, reduces carbon emissions. Then, some cloud providers use green data centers that run on renewable energy. Lastly, cloud resources are auto-scalable. This ensures that no extra energy or hardware is wasted while business requirements are also met.

Continuous monitoring

In DevOps, continuous monitoring refers to constant monitoring and analysis of the development and operations processes. But in terms of sustainable DevOps, continuous monitoring refers to constantly checking the environmental impact of software’s instead. It involves tracking parameters like carbon emissions, energy consumption, and resource utilization.

Carbon Footprint, released by Google Cloud in 2022, is a monitoring tool that helps businesses track their carbon emissions based on their Google Cloud platform usage.

Automation

Automation can help in efficient resource utilization and make sure resources are used only when necessary. It can automatically scale up resources (like servers) during peak times and scale down during peak-off times. In this way, it also helps in reducing unnecessary costs. Automated monitoring tools can help monitor carbon and energy efficiency as discussed before. They can also be used to detect anomalies and inefficient codes.

Conclusion

Sustainable DevOps is about making the process of developing and running software more environmentally friendly and responsible. It combines the speed and efficiency of DevOps with sustainable practices like using energy-efficient technology, writing efficient code, and reducing waste. By adopting Sustainable DevOps, organizations can not only improve their software delivery but also help protect the environment and support long-term social and economic health. Embracing these practices benefits everyone—businesses, customers, and the planet.

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Container Security Scanning

Shiwani Sharma — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 07:25:56 +0000

An Brief Introduction On Container Security Scanning & Their Tools

What is Docker Security Scanning?

[Container Security Scanning]….All services that you require inside a container Docker permits you to install all this, you are free from all the worries about installing on a similar package with several versions on your system. You can use Docker to operate services and applications and it has its sandboxes which are known as containers. With the help of a Docker, you can easily dispense the whole environment of an application from one to another. The process to find out the presumed security in the package listed in your Docker image. Docker image security plays a very important role in terms of Docker security. If we have to generate a Docker image then firstly we have to generate a Dockerfile and by utilizing the Docker build command you can turn it into an image after finishing Dockfile.[Container Security Scanning]

Container/ Docker Security Scanning Tools

These tools are important to find out for identifying vulnerabilities in container images. These tools examine container images for known vulnerabilities, compliance issues and misconfigurations. Now we will explain some of the tools are as follow:

Docker Bench

It is utilized in the production to search numerous best practices and the automated tests for checking the best practices around Docker containers and it works like a script. Docker Bench focuses on developers because it regulates containers with the community edition of Docker. You have to require Docker 1.13.0 to operate Docker Bench. It’s an open-source script that checks for best practices in Docker deployments. This tool is created to automate security check , support to making sure that Docker host and container attach to the best security practices as outlined by Docker’s security guidelines.

Clair

It is an open-source project which is utilized in Quay.io that has an alternative to Docker Hub and it is also a public container registry that is created by CoreOS. It proposes security for applications and dockers and by using Clair you can create services that continuously regulate your container for any susceptibility of the container. Every data is recorded in NVD, which means National Vulnerability Database, so in a case where any error recognizes them, it will procure the circumstances and furnish every detail in the report.

Anchore

For scanning, the CI/CD pipeline Anchore is obtainable in Jenkins Plugins and it can operate on orchestration and standalone platforms like Rancher, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm and Amazon ECS. One of the important features of Anchore is to permit the users to execute the intense container image exploration to check the package of the operating system, RubyGEMs and Node.JS modules as well every single file is coated in the analysis.

OpenSCAP

This is one of the best tools that is used by security auditors and IT admins that consists of open source tools, configuration baselines and open security benchmark guides. It also uses SCAP which means Security Content Automation Protocol which is NIST -certified that furnishes the security policies and that is readable to machines. In comparison with others, OpenSCAP is more broad-based than others.

Dagda

It’s an open-source tool that is used for static analysis of container security and also for scanning viruses, vulnerabilities, malware and viruses in Docker containers. If you want to use Dagda then firstly you have to scan the Docker container. It stored the vulnerability data as well. It is very flexible that handles both REST API as well CLI and that is one of the important benefits of Dagda and for the detection of vulnerability, it operates an antivirus engine named ClamAV.

Black Duck OpsSight

It is also an open-source vulnerability that observes and accentuates any of the images which consist of open source vulnerabilities. In case of any differences, Black Duck OpsSight noticed and attended within the orchestration platforms. One of the important features of OpsSight is its standard container images that have a security policy that is open source.

Sysdig Falco

Sysdig Falco tool is formulated by Sysdig to recognize some bizarre action in your application which is an open-source tool as well and that is created for Kubernetes, cloud environment and containers. It also regulates and recognizes host, network activity, container and application. It constantly monitors and discovered unpredicted behavior, vulnerabilities, intrusions in actual time. It combine with several Kubernetes environments, SIEM tools and CI/Cd pipelines.

Dockle

It’s an open-source tool that is very useful for ascertaining that the best practices for writing Dockerfiles chase Docker drawbacks. You can also use Dockle to lint container images in opposition to user exemption escalation, CIS benchmarks, potentially vulnerable commands and assisting to ignore sensitive mysteries. With the help of other platforms like Mac OS X, Linux and Homebrew you can easily install Dockle.

Trivia

It is formulated to be used within the process of CI and CD and to deploy an application or previously delivered to a container to scan for vulnerabilities. In the other word you can say for any container, it’s a vulnerability scanner. This is a complete security scanning tool that is created by Aqua Security and it is utilized for identifying vulnerabilities in file system, container images, & Git repositories. It scan the container images for vulnerabilities in some of the OS package as like RHEL, Debian etc.

Hadolint

This tool is written in Haskell that is operated by a small firm or a team and it also supports the team’s for their structure or in other ways team structure and deploys Docker containers best practices and it works as a linter also.

Conclusion

The adoption of container security scanning tools is not just a best practice but a necessity in today’s fast-paced, security-conscious development landscape. Whether you’re a developer, DevOps engineer, or security professional, leveraging these tools can significantly enhance your security posture and safeguard your applications against evolving threats. Embrace container security scanning as a fundamental part of your DevSecOps strategy to build and maintain resilient, secure applications.

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Terraform Tools to know in 2024

Shiwani Sharma — Thu, 30 May 2024 11:47:45 +0000

5 Most Powerful Terraform Tools (2024)

Terraform; Here in this blog article we will discuss top Terraform tools in 2024 but before going to understand about top Terraform tools, it’s important to know about Terraform first.

What is Terraform?

It is an open-source IaC (Infrastructure as Code) tool that is created by HashiCorp. It allows the users to define by utilizing a high-level configuration language called HashiCorp that is also called HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language). It also allows you to explain your infrastructure in code, making it easy to version control, share and reuse configurations. This techniques helps in the best practices in DevOps and agile methodologies. It handle the resources by utilizing configuration files and the resources are like databases, networking and virtual machines.

Now Further you will see 5 important terraform tools that is popular in 2024 and these are as follow:

1. TFlint

This is one of the important as well as powerful tool of Terraform that help to make sure your Terraform code be pasted to best practices and it is free of any style issues and potential error. It comes with a complete set of build-in rules that check for normal mistakes and carry out best practices. These rules enfolds several features as like required attributes, resources naming conventions and some particular Terraform constructs. In this tool you are able to write the custom rules to execute your organization’s coding standards. This type of workability permits your team to adapt the linting process to their particular requirement. This tool also support the plugin system which can increase its services. There are many plugins that are officially helpful and community as well for several cloud providers such as GCP, AWS, Azure etc. that permit extra limited checks adapt to certain providers.

This tool is created in such a way to be very quick and well organized, It can quickly scan large Terraform projects, making it suitable for utilizing in CI/CD pipelines where performance is important.

Benefit Of Using TFlint

One of the best benefit of TFlint is it consume the time because it automates the process of code analysis for the configuration of Terraform, that will save the time for reviewers and developers.

This tool maintains the consistency by enforcing coding standards and best practices across the team.

It will helps in improving code quality by securing your Terraform code is acceptable and robust.

It helps to find out the security issues and also decrease the risk of deploying vulnerable infrastructure.

2. Digger

This is a open source platform of IaC management that is created to increase the utilization of Terraform and this tool is for automating the provisioning of infrastructure as code. This tool is concentrate on reliability, usability and efficiency of Terraform providing some extra power that streamline the infrastructure management. This tool also helps to combine the workflows with CI/CD pipelines and also improve the state management ability as like backup, versioning and state locking. This tool also has some ability to help the team in collaborating and access control as like shared state management and RBAC that means role-based access control as well it has the ability to allow many team members to work on the similar infrastructure codebase without facing any difficulty.

Benefit Of Using Digger

One of the best benefit of using digger is it improved the automation and CI/CD integration.

This tools helps in managing cost that is based on Terraform plans and also support in team budget and handle expenses as well it optimize the resources utilization and decrease the cost.

It also support to find out the security problems in Terraform code and provides best practices on direction.

It boost the monitoring and logging skills that provide the deep into Terraform operations and support the team to solve any troubleshoot problems and understand the impact of changes.

3. Former2

This is one of the important tool for any person who want to take on infrastructure-as-code practices in their AWS environment. Former2 is an open source tool that is created to clarify the process of creating the template of Cloud Formation and Terraform from managing AWS resources. A person or a user who is using this tool can scan AWS account and find out surviving resource, providing a broad list of all the resources that can be exported to Cloud Formation or Terraform templates. It also support a broad range of some services of AWS, make sure that the most of the infrastructure components can be recorded and exported.

Benefit Of Former2

The best from all is it consume the time because it automates the difficult way of writing infrastructure code from scratch.

It also helps in maintaining consistency in infrastructure provisioning by utilizing some normalized templates.

It provides the migration support that means through many accounts or religions it provide the perfect templates.

This tool is also good for documentations for existing infrastructure , making it simple to handle and understand.

4. Regula

This tools is utilized for evaluating the security and compliance of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), including Terraform configurations. It is created to support and assure that your infrastructure be fixed to security policies and deference standards before deployment. It consists predefined policies that align with common compliance frameworks as like CIS benchmarks, NIST, and many more. This type of compliance policies support and ensure that your Terraform configurations adhere to industry standards and best practices. It can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines, allowing for automated compliance checks during the build and deployment process. It supports a variety of cloud providers, making it a versatile tool for organizations using multi-cloud environments. It can evaluate Terraform configurations targeting AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and other providers.

Benefit Of Regula:

This tool is able to detect the problems easily.

It also provide multi-cloud support that consists of Google Cloud, AWS and Azure.

It compliance with industry standard that will help the organizations to meet regulatory requirements and demonstrate compliance to auditors and stakeholders.

It helps in reducing the risk of security breaches.

5. Infracost

This tool provides the cost estimates for infrastructure managed by Terraform. It helps DevOps and cloud engineering teams understand the cost implications of their infrastructure changes before they deploy them. Infracost also supports various cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. It generates human-readable cost reports that can be easily shared and understood by stakeholders, promoting cost awareness across the team. Infracost can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines to provide cost estimates automatically as part of the development workflow. This ensures cost considerations are factored into every change.

Benefit Of Infracost

This tool provides detailed cost estimates based on your Terraform configurations, helping teams understand the financial implications of their infrastructure decisions before they are deployed.

Infracost allows teams to evaluate the cost impact of changes during the planning phase. This helps prevent costly mistakes and ensures that all infrastructure changes are cost-effective.

Conclusion:

By incorporating these tools into your Terraform workflows, you can achieve greater efficiency, collaboration, and cost management. Whether you are looking to streamline complex setups, ensure code quality, or manage costs effectively, these tools offer the features and integrations needed to enhance your infrastructure as code practices. Adopting these tools will help your team stay ahead in the ever-evolving DevOps landscape, ensuring robust and scalable infrastructure management.

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Understanding Cloud Native in 2024 : An Overview

Shiwani Sharma — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 05:39:56 +0000

Understanding Cloud Native

Cloud Native;This technology is all about skill, speed and improving the way of designing a very important system of business. The procedure of business is developing from facilitating the skill of business to existing some strategic modification that helps to stimulate the speed and growth of business and instantly it provides the ideas to the market. There are some features and pillars or points that procure the bedrock for cloud-native systems that are the Microservices, Containers, Backing services, Automation and the last one is Modern design. Cloud-native is one of the important themes in software development and it is the outlook of software development. It has changed the procedure and the way we understand the operating software product, deploying, developing.

Cloud-native affects the operation of your application, design, deployment and enactment. This provides all this not only operating the prevailing application and many more. Providing the benefit of the cloud computing model, the cloud native is the way to create and operate an application.

What is the Cloud Native Computing Foundation?

CNCF (The Cloud Native Computing Foundation) that is developed in the year 2015 which is an open-source foundation that facilitates the adoption of cloud-native computing and that motive is to organize a society that is vendor irreligious for the developers, IT technology and the service providers to work together as an open-source people.

You can utilize cloud-native computing foundation as open-source software as well as many other technologies to create and deploy applications on some platform-like cloud computing, some of the technologies are microservices, containers, service mesh etc. It also conserves some of the branded technologies and assures them to use them properly for the society elements.

What is Cloud Native Architecture?

It’s an open-source software foundation that consists of some of the big organizations or platforms like Cisco, IBM, Google, VMware, Intel etc. And it’s main function is to be assigned for creating cloud-native computing universal and bearable. Some companies require a software company and it is not necessary of having a software business for that, so for that Cloud Native Computing Foundation is required. Cloud-native permits to work rapidly for all the software and IT companies. You can establish software in the house as well all the people who belong from the business to near partner with the people who belong from IT by accepting the technologies of cloud-native, this contributes sufficient benefits to their clients.

Benefit of Cloud-Native Application

Image Credit: https://www.xenonstack.com/blog/cloud-native-architecture

There are many benefits of cloud native application, some of the benefit we are going to discuss below:

Provided customer satisfaction: Adding more characteristics and giving more speed and creating customer engagement and employee experiences is one of the important benefits of cloud-native applications and by this the customer and it also permits you to Enhance the experience of the customer. Customer can approach the application faster and accurately and by that it impact a positive response to the customers.
Decreased the expenditure: Many of the organizations are utilizing Kubernetes for containers and it operates resources in the cloud for being an open-source platform. At last by all this, it decreases the expenditure and it is beneficial for the organization.
Ease of Management: By utilizing some of the platforms like Azure function, AWS Lambda, on these platforms no one have to take tension and not necessarily about managing as like allocating storage, configuring networking etc.
Cost Efficient: Cloud-Native application helps the organization to improve their infrastructure costs. There are many services that helps to decrease the infrastructure expenses such as pay when you are using the pricing model, auto scaling, resources optimization tools etc. Cloud native infrastructure also helps to decrease the maintenance cost, backup cost and development etc.
Enhanced Security: One of the best benefit of cloud native application is it help to enhanced the security. Though we know CI/CD pipelines can be utilized in the workflow of cloud-native development and these pipelines automate the process of testing, building, deploying applications etc. that will help to enhance the security. Cloud-native has the dynamic scalability that means it can scale dynamically based on demand using the platform container orchestration like Kubernetes. This scalability permits the organization to respond to vary workload while maintaining security.

Conclusion: The journey of cloud native is not merely a technological shift, it represents a cultural transformation. It encourages collaboration, embraces automation, and fosters a mindset that values resilience and adaptability. Cloud native technology is all about skill, speed and improving the ways of designing a very important system of business. The procedure of business is developing from facilitating the skill of business to existing some strategic modification that helps to stimulate the speed and growth of business and instantly it provides the ideas to the market.

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GitHub Action Looking at in 2024

Shiwani Sharma — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 06:47:40 +0000

Introduction To GitHub Action

GitHub Action ;This platform can be utilized for deploy code, compile and test and that permit the formulation of workflow.

This has many characteristics as well it contains CI and CD Continuous Integration and Continuous deployment or in the other word it’s an CI/CD platform that automates, build and test deployment pipelines.

Microsoft developed GitHub and GitHub Action is one of the functions that was added by Microsoft and beside that the other functions and features are also added.

It facilitates the users to develop the workflows (SDLC) Software Development Life Cycle in their GitHub storage. GitHub is like a market place where people can share the action with the other people and then utilize it for their desire.

GitHub Action permits you to safely utilize and collect secretes within your workflows and these secretes are utilized to authenticate with external services, store API keys.

As per Wikipedia:

GitHub is a developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage and share their code. It uses Git software, providing the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project.

Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.

It gives Windows, macOs virtual machine, Linux to operate your workflows and the best part is if you want host your runner by yourself then you can host in your own cloud infrastructure or data center. GitHub action is a platform for open source project that anyone who want’s, they can use it and also contribute to the project.

Basic Concept Of GitHub Action

Image Credit: https://programmingpercy.tech/blog/github-actions-in-action/

Some of the basis concept that is used in GitHub Action are discussed below :

Steps: Steps operate a command or actions & in a job it is an individual tasks that represents the action that require to performed as like running a command, utilizing pre-built actions and executing a script. It can also be based on the outcome of previous steps and can be configured with numerous settings as like conditionals, outputs, inputs and environment variables.

Environments: It is an sensible deployment targets where it becomes easy for you to deploy your applications and also you can define numerous environments such as staging, production and has to configure specific settings for particular environment. environment also utilized to promote code through several stages of your deployment pipeline.

Event: Events are specific activities that can activate the performance of workflow. Event can consists actions as like push events, update, issue comments, pull request creation and more. You can also specify one or many triggers for your workflow.

Action: For building a job as a step it is the tiniest construction block of a workflow.

From the market area you can easily develop your own action and can borrow the shared action of the public.

Actions can be used again that perform particular tasks within your workflows. It can be used privately in the organization or directly within the workflow files as dependencies in other actions.

Runner: The main function of Runner is to defer the work which is accessible and then report the progress and be eligible to perform the action. It can be self-hosted on your machines and hosted on GitHub.

Workflow: This is a natural process that earns one or more multiple jobs and can be activated by the events. It can be distinguished by the utilization of YAML files in the GitHub/workflows directory. It is an automated process that outlines the series of actions to be performed in response to specific events.

Benefit of GitHub Action

Some of the benefit of GitHub Action are as follow:

On GitHub Action you have all the commands of API as input and output.
It’s like a people hub or in other word you can say a marketplace where people investment on action and utilities it as per there necessity.
It’s an open source GitHub action with again doing the process of Enactment.
In GitHub Action, users have with relatively restriction and have willing to permit to the GitHub API.
It is just a successive docker run and rocker build.
It is constructed to assist you to create dynamic automation and robust.
It proposes a free plan and it supports some other platforms and creates the environment such as Windows, Linux, container and macOS.
By using GitHub Action, you are going to save your time as well money.
It provides many characteristics on a quick basis and it detects error.

Conclusion: To conclude, GitHub Actions emerges as a game-changer, offering a seamless integration of workflows directly within the familiar GitHub environment. Throughout the exploration of GitHub Actions, we have uncovered its versatility from automating CI/CD pipelines to orchestrating complex workflows tailored to your needs. GitHub is like a market place where people can share the action with the other people and then utilize it for their desire.

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CI/CD Tools Comparison

Shiwani Sharma — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 02:48:43 +0000

What is CI/CD?

CI and CD stand for continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD).

The main target of both the tools is desktop applications and now web and cloud services. A mixture of two software developments is called continuous integration and continuous delivery. Both are useful in software for the automation which facilitates the differences in code incremental to transmit quickly and that is beneficial for the production from the user’s desktops.

It is a process where the commodity gets on the market quickly and from the production, the code is continuously delivered, new characteristics come with the profitable procedure of delivery.

While writing a code, a developer doing practice is CI and doing the practice done after the code is completed is CD. In CI the code is created, planning and then testing is continuous whereas in CD for testing and development it transmits the code automatically. For enhancing your or

Continuous Delivery (CD) consists of many things for the user into the production of such as some new features , bug fixes, configuration changes etc.

Some stages of CI/CD pipelines are as follow:

Image Credit: https://www.mindbowser.com/devops-ci-cd-pipeline-stages/

Why is CI/CD important ?

By discussing some key point you will get to know why CI/CD is important. So let’s discuss the points below.

Cost Decreases

It saves the developer time and reduces the number of errors by this the developer can invest their time on product development. As we know this tool has less code that if they find any error caught on a quick basis and increasing the quality of code also increases your ROI.

Provides Customer Satisfaction

CI/CD is important because it increases the size of the organization by providing all the needs of the customer and satisfies them. In the first opinion, a new customer converted into a long term satisfied customer. This tool gives new features, bug fixes and with time rises new technology will also be updated.

Quicker (MTTR) Mean Time To Resolution

A new feature will be updated so it is important to take care of the old features. Rebuilding of a damaged feature with the set of average time and estimates the maintainability of repairable features is MTTR.

Delivered The Best Code Quality

CI/CD is important because it improves the code quality, as it permits the use of a small amount of code at a particular time. These codes are easy to handle and if any type of issues come, they can be overhauled soon at a later date.

Decreased Backlog

In the development process, the backlog of non-critical defects is quieter because the other features arise and the defects are stabilized.

CI/CD Tools

Some of the most popular CI/CD tools are as follow:

Jenkins
TeamCity
Circle CI
Codeship

There are many tools in CI/CD , but we have mention few important and very popular are as follow:

Jenkins

In the top priorities of CI/CD tools, Jenkins is also in a ranking which was inaugurated in 2011. It’s an open-source tool for on-premise CI automation and web-based that you can use for free. You can use this on Linux, macOS platforms and Windows. It can distribute automation of CI/CD in the cloud and which is formulated for cloud providers and Kubernetes clusters. For the improvement of building and testing, it has the power of the development of machine networks.

TeamCity

It is an open-source tool that is highly extensible and is founded on CI/CD tools in Java. JetBrains company developed many other important tools like IntelliJ Idea, PyCharm also developed this tool TeamCity and you can find this on Linux Servers and Windows after the installation.

Though you can use it for free, it has a 14 days free trial version but it’s cost 45$ per month. It aids in launching formulated agents in the Kubernetes cluster.

CircleCI

It’s an open-source and large-scale project which provides CI/CD pipelines as Workflow. It also endorses the programming languages which are created on several platforms like Mac OS, Linux Windows. Besides that, it also aids cloud-based platforms such as Google Cloud, Azure, AWS etc. One of the main purposes of formulated CircleCI is for scalability and speed and it can easily be recognized.

You can find it for free as well as by buying it for @$30 per month.

Codeship

Codeship is also a CI/CD tool that is also very popular and important in today’s era that permit the developers to set all the pipelines that spontaneously activate the process when it is required to change the code to send the repository. This tool also helps to integration with many others famous platform just like Google Cloud Platform, AWS & Heroku etc.

Jenkins vs Travis CI vs CircleCI

S.NO.	Jenkins	Travis CI	Circle CI
01	It’s an open-source tool for on-premise CI automation and web-based.	It is developed for an open-source project.	It’s a cloud-based tool that automates the deployment process.
02	You can use this on Linux, macOS platforms and Windows	Its target is on the CI level and with the alert system and automated testing that helps to enhance the performance of the build process.	This helps in several platforms like Linux, containers,OSX that can be operated with the private cloud.
03	You can use this for free.	You can use Travis CI for free.	You can find it for free as well as by buying it for @$30 per month.
04	It is formulated for cloud providers and Kubernetes clusters.	It is formulated to observe the difference in testing and building.	It is formulated for scalability and speed and it can easily be recognized.

Conclusion: The main target of both the tools is desktop applications and now web and cloud services. A mixture of two software developments is called continuous integration and continuous delivery. Both are useful in software for the automation which facilitates the differences in code incremental to transmit quickly and that is beneficial for the production from the user’s desktops.

As we have discussed some popular tools and have done the comparison between them, but the tools you choose between one from all the tool is important to accelerating the software delivery, fostering collaboration and improving code quality within the development team.

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Platform Engineer VS DevOps Vs SRE : Understanding the difference

Shiwani Sharma — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 17:12:19 +0000

Over the last few years the terms and roles of Platform engineer, DevOps & SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) have gained a lot of popularity. All three are related to the same field Software Development and Operations field but they all have different ror even overlapping responsibilities.

Image Credit:https://www.getambassador.io/blog/rise-of-cloud-native-engineering-organizations

As you can see in the image above, you can observe how teams are organized into Platform engineers and SRE, as well as how the teams measure the success of both. This will give you an idea of their differentiation. They collaborate with various teams, including multiple development teams. Now, in the following article, you will learn about SRE, DevOps, and Platform Engineers separately.

What is Platform Engineer?

As we already discussed about platform engineering in our separate blog article (An Overview Of Platform Engineering) you will get the more insights about Platform engineering.

A platform engineer’s responsibilities are to organize, create, and maintain the infrastructure that endorses the DevOps of software applications. Now-a-days platform engineer is becoming in trend because it guaranteed to provide the best experience to developer and speed up the product team. They also helps the work of developer more efficiently just by doing CI/CD pipelines, configuring IaC( Infrastructure as Code) to automate the cloud resources.

Platform engineering is a new discipline that has emerged in response to the growing complexity of our modern day Cloud-native architectures. It can be called as a practice of building and maintaining an integrated product, which we call as “Internal Developer Platform” (IDP) ,which acts as a flexible and supported abstraction layer between developers and the underlying technologies of their applications.

Platform engineering is a process or an art that combines several tools and technologies which streamlines the software development and delivery process and help decrease the mental load on individual contributors, enabling self-service platforms for developers and other stakeholders.

What is DevOps Engineer?

A Process that integrates IT operations, practice, tools, software development And contributes the outstanding characteristics of software with the endless delivery.

It characterises the take on the renewal of programmable infrastructure and expenditure, software development, industrialisation. In a company, it stimulates alliance and transmission.

DevOps have some procedures such as the CI/CD tool (Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery) with an intensity of task automation. Microservices, Container, and executing together with the DevOps methodologies. Though it is clear that it has some methodologies, it is not a technology.

Image Credit: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/devops-tutorial/

As you can see in the above image , you can get some idea exactly about what is DevOps ? The two words define DevOps (Dev + Ops ) (software development and Operations) and in other words, you can say the assortment of software development and operation is known as DevOps.

It enhances the speed and quality of the application that has been delivering to an enormous extent and that’s why it’s becoming more prominent for the organization.

It provides you with the faster speed, security for your code, delivered quickly, these are some of the important features of using DevOps.

What is an SRE? (Site Reliability Engineering)

SRE is known as Site reliability engineering. The team of SRE works as a tool that uses the software for unravelling any difficulties and managing the system. Through coding, it supports regulating huge systems that control a bundle of machines or you can say more than thousands of machines. It has many more similarities to DevOps. Site reliability engineering was inaugurated by Ben TreynorSloss and the idea of SRE came from Google Engineering. The engineer who is working on Google has written SRE. There are two terms and components which are very valuable for SRE are automation and standardization. They always want to work in two ways either to automate operations tasks. It helps the team for its movability means if a team wants to move from a traditional approach to IT operations to a cloud-native method, then the SRE supports their team for that. For enhancing the integrity of software and the infrastructure which operates it and SRE furnishes incentive and expensive input.

Image Credit: https://www.devopsschool.com/blog/𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗢𝗽𝘀-𝗩𝘀-𝗦𝗥𝗘-𝗩𝘀-𝗣𝗹𝗮/

This above image help you to know more about these three and get a better differentiation between DevOps, SRE & Platform Engineering.

Main differences Between Platform Engineer, DevOps & SRE

KEY DIFFERENCES

PLATFORM ENGINEER

DEVOPS

SRE

Automation

Platform engineer forces automation in CI/CD

DevOps encourages automation. It also uses automation in testing, monitoring, CI/CD.

Same as DevOps, SRE also encourages automation.

Communication& Collaboration

It facilitates the communication and it also collaborate between operation and development team.

As a core principle Devops also facilitates the communication and collaborate between operation and development team.

Same as platform engineer and DevOps SRE collaborate with operation and development team and also it deliver high-quality software.

Responsibility

A platform engineer’s responsibilities are to organize, create, and maintain the infrastructure that endorses the DevOps of software applications

DevOps are responsible for solving the trouble and production monitoring.

Same as DevOps but also uses the monitoring tools Grafana,Splunk.

Conclusion:

So at the end we see that these three, DevOps, SRE & Platform Engineering are very important approaches in the today’s software development world and each of these has its own unique function and their responsibility. A platform engineer’s responsibilities are to organize, create, and maintain the infrastructure that endorses the DevOps of software applications. DevOps is a Process that integrates IT operations, practice, tools, software development And contributes the outstanding characteristics of software with the endless delivery. The team of SRE engineers works as a unit that uses the software tools for mointiring and unravelling any difficulties in managing the system.

We can say that the current fast-paced software development environments demand close collaboration among SRE, DevOps and Platform Engineering to meet various requirements for a seamless Development, Deployment, and improved production systems.

We can finally conclude that: Even though these roles are distinct, but their responsibilities may overlap, based on the needs and requirements of the organizations.

The post Platform Engineer VS DevOps Vs SRE : Understanding the difference appeared first on DevopsCurry.

Securing your CI/CD pipelines with DevSecOps in 2023

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 17:03:38 +0000

Injecting Security in your CI/CD pipelines

DevOps is well known for the path-breaking changes it has brought in the software industry. The most prominent one is to bring the Dev and Ops team together, to work in sync at all times throughout the application development lifecycle. And the second is to automate pretty much the entire CI/CD pipeline. These two have been the most remarkable transformation brought to us by the DevOps process.

DevOps has been constantly finding ways to make the CI/CD pipeline more efficient and better. Today we cipf-es.org are going to discuss DevSecOps; the process aims to put a security blanket around the entire lifecycle.

In the older processes, the security check-in the older processes for the application used to happen at the later stages usually before the deployment. This practice would result in fixing last-minute code and testing issues which in turn delays the product release.

So, to accelerate the whole process DevOps uses the ‘Shift Left’ approach. The method focuses on bringing the security practice right from the early stages of the DevOps lifecycle. The key is to incorporate test and security at the beginning ensures speedy process.

Securing the application is not which means to be done at a certain point it needs to be done at every step throughout the process. Securing the application is a continuous process that’s why it’s called Continuous Assurance.

Now the question arises what do we need to check for the security?

Automated CI/CD processes are a critical component of DevOps infrastructure. CI/CD orchestration tools like Jenkins, CicleCI, Bamboo, TeamCity,Travis,Buddy etc are increasingly deployed in DevOps processes to improve processes, facilitate faster deployment of software and product delivery, and provide continuous cost reduction.

But we also need to keep in mind that these CI/CD tools are the biggest consumers of secret and confidential data and have access to a lot of sensitive resources such as other apps and services and information like codebases, credentials and databases.

Ensuring that our CI/CD pipelines are protected and secured and cannot be compromised, is a must.Hence we need to think about the ways to protect the pipeline itself.

Security Checks for CI/CD Pipelines

There are several security checks that needs to be performed:

Source Code Vulnerabilities– This check is related to security of the software. If the source code is not protected might be subjected to potential malicious attacks.

OSS Library Vulnerabilities– Well not just source-code, there are high chances that the open source library used in the application can have vulnerabilities.

OSS Version– Open-source libraries come in handy, but there are chances that after a few years that version may be deprecated. If deprecated then there might not be any maintenance or any replacement for the library.

Identifying Compromising Credentials- there is always a possibility of human error when dealing with secrets and credentials within your CI/CD pipeline. However we now have many tools that can scan for secrets and credentials which can be accidentally committed to a source code repository.

There are several other vulnerabilities that the application might be exposed to due to libraries, code infrastructure, or any exposures. So here are some ways as how do we check for Security?

Static Application system Testing (SAST)- The testing is primarily done before code compilation. The testing method analyses the code security vulnerabilities. It is also known as white-box testing. This test happens very early in the SDLC as it helps to fix the code issues.

Active and Passive penetration test (Dynamic Analysis) – The test is described as a dynamic analysis because it checks the system response to variables/parameters that are not constant. In easy language, it checks the application behaviour with real-time values.

Infrastructure Analysis- This involves scanning the actual environment like configuration, server status to understand and analyse the actual drift and what could be the fix for the drift.

These are some of the checks that are performed by the Build/Devops team to ensure a secure CI/CD channel.

You can also refer to our posts on CI/CD, Why Jenkins is so popular and Alternatives to Jenkins.

Understanding CI/CD in a DevOps Toolchain

What makes Jenkins everyone’s favourite in 2020

Jenkins is getting Old, so what are the alternatives in 2021 ?

Security Tools for CI/CD Pipelines

There are many Devops tools available in the market to perform these tests. Let’s have a look at a few tools:

Checkmarx– Facilitates the SAST testing to analyze the code vulnerabilities in the early stages. It can be easily integrated with any CI/CD tool or environment.

IMMUNIO- The tool provides cloud based solution to protect the web application from malicious attacks. The tools is unique because it does not continuously scan the application instead it focuses on possible vulnerabilities.

Aqua Security- The tool gives the security for containers throughout the CI/CD pipeline. The main feature is that it works with all platforms and clouds very well.Aqua security helps save the day, providing container security throughout the DevSecOps pipeline.

OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) – One of the most popular tools to protect the web applications from potential threats. It produces ZAP Docker weekly which has all the common vulnerabilities listed.

Twistlock – A multifaceted tool which offers security to containers, hosts, and serverless components.

CyberArk: CyberArk provides a way to keep secrets out of your Jenkins master, off disk, and also out of source control. CyberArk provides a Jenkins plugin which can be uses to provide credentials to your Jenkins jobs at runtime. The plugin securely provides credentials that are stored in Conjur to Jenkins jobs.

WhiteSource: Another type of security risk for your CI/CD pipelines is the open-source vulnerabilities.WhiteSource is a tool that integrates into the DevOps pipeline, and runs continuously in the background, tracking the security, licensing, and quality of open source components and matching them against WhiteSource’s comprehensive database of open source repositories to provide real-time alerts

Chef InSpec: Inspec from Chef is also recommended for scanning your applications and infrastructure. Chef InSpec is an open-source (OSS) automated testing tool for integration, compliance, security, and other policy requirements.

Fortify Webinspect (MicroFocus): Fortify WebInspect is another dynamic application security testing (DAST) security tools that finds and prioritizes exploitable vulnerabilities in your web applications.

The list goes on as there are many more Devops tools available as per the need of the application.

Conclusion

So we now realise that baking security within your Devops CI/CD process is the need of the hour. With more and more organisations adopting and integrating CI/CD tools for their build, release and deployment process, keeping your CI/CD pipelines secure is more important than ever before.

In today’s world, just like quality, security is also a shared responsibility.

In this above post we have tried talking about importance of DevSecOps in your CI/CD pipeline and covered ways and tools that can help you implement standard security measures for pipeline security.

The post Securing your CI/CD pipelines with DevSecOps in 2023 appeared first on DevopsCurry.

Preparing for Jenkins Interview: Common Interview Questions

Admin-Devopscurry — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 14:49:34 +0000

Jenkins Interview Questions

In this post we are sharing some of the commonly asked Jenkins interview questions. We are not sharing the answers, as we assume that if you are preparing for Jenkins interview, you have already worked with Jenkins or read about it. Hence sharing only questions and also some pointers if needed for some questions.

I hope that you find these FAQs useful and they help you in your preparation for CI/CD in Devops roles, in case you have other additional questions, do feel free to share them in comments.

For Beginners

What is Jenkins and why do we use it? (if you mention CI/CD in your answer, it can divert to what is CI & CD in Devops)
What do you understand by CI or continuous integration?
How did Jenkins come into existence? (They want you to talk about Hudson project, and Jenkins history)
What are the advantages of using Jenkins?
What are the prerequisites to use Jenkins?What are the software prerequisites that must be met before installing Jenkins ?
Name some common plugins you have used for Jenkins in your project.
What other continuous integration tools do you know or have worked with? How are they different from Jenkins? (This is same as Jenkins vs Bamboo/TeamCity/CircleCI/Travis CI/Buildkite etc)
In a typical Devops lifecycle phases or Devops stages, where does Jenkins fit it? At what stage in Devops is Jenkins involved.
Can you manually start Jenkins? If, yes then how? (Share the commands to start Jenkins manually. Start Jenkins: jenkins.exe start, Stop Jenkins: jenkins.exe stop,Restart Jenkins: jenkins.exe restart)
How can you trigger Jenkins from CLI(command line)
What are the two components that you can integrate Jenkins with? (You can integrate Jenkins with: Version Control systems like Git, SVN and also Build tools like Apache Maven)
What is a Jenkins Pipeline?
What are the steps involved in a Jenkins pipeline? (Share about the three steps: Build, test,deploy)
What is a Jenkins job?
What is default port in Jenkins? (8080)
What is flow control in Jenkins?
What are the types of Pipelines in Jenkins? (Share the two types: Declarative & Scripted)
What is Groovy?
What are tasks performed by Jenkins Master?
Where does all the Jenkins configuration & logs get stored? In other words, What is the use of JENKINS_HOME directory?
Can you move or copy Jenkins jobs from one server to another? How
Explain how you created a backup and copy files in Jenkins?

Intermediate or Advanced Questions

Jenkins Advanced Interview Questions (More focus on general issues and also with Jenkins troubleshooting)

What You Do When You See A Broken Build For Your Project In Jenkins?
How Can You Clone A Git Repository through Jenkins?
How will you secure Jenkins?
What do you mean by the terms Agent, post-section, Jenkinsfile?
Which is the native scripting language used in Jenkins?
Have you heard of Kubernetes? Have you used Kubernetes? Is it possible to integrate Jenkins with Kubernetes?
What is a backup plugin? Why is it used?
What are the various ways to configure Jenkins node agent to communicate with Jenkins master?
How does Jenkins authenticate users? (Three main ways: 1.The default way is to store user data and credentials in an internal database.2. Configure Jenkins to use the authentication mechanism defined by the application server on which it is deployed.3. Configure Jenkins to authenticate against LDAP server)
Is it possible to turn off Jenkins Security if the administrative users have locked out of the admin console? Explain how.
How can you create a Multibranch Pipeline in Jenkins?
Explain the difference between Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment?
Do you know about Blue ocean in Jenkins. (Blue Ocean is GUI for Jenkins ,created to make it easier for teams to use Jenkins. When using blue ocean you can visualize the jobs getting executed and personalize it)
What are the best ways to make sure that your Jenkins database is secure?
How to trigger a build remotely from Jenkins? How to configure Git post commit hook?
What is matrix-based security?
What is a Jenkins Workspace?Can we provide a custom workspace in Jenkins?
Name the Jenkins environment variables that you have used in a shell script or batch file.

The post Preparing for Jenkins Interview: Common Interview Questions appeared first on DevopsCurry.

Jenkins is getting Old, so what are the alternatives in 2021 ?

Namrata Joshi — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 08:43:33 +0000

Why You Should Look For Jenkins Alternative? Best Alternatives for Jenkins in 2020-21

Jenkins has been a de-facto standard tool for CI/CD in the Devops pipeline for many years now.However over the last couple of years , it looks like Jenkins is loosing is luster and sheen, especially with the world showing a fast adaptability for technologies like docker and kubernetes.

So is Jenkins going to be a dead and lost tool soon?

Well, its too early to comment or assume such theories, but definitely as the DevOps people we need to keep an eye on the Continuous Change and Continuous Evolvement of new and better tools in the ecosystem.

Jenkins as a CI tool and common issues

Jenkins is one of the essential CI/CD tool for DevOps professionals. It is one of the most trusted and well-known open-source tools. Jenkins is used for building and testing software projects continuously which makes it easy for developers to integrate changes in a project. Jenkins is a continuous integration software tool.

However, since the last few years, Jenkins has been losing its shine and reputation. Jenkins enjoys a lots of love and support from the community and also many plugins to support the Jenkins ecosystem.

Off-late a lot of Jenkins plugins have become redundant, and are no longer maintained.Also not all plugins are compatible with the new Declarative style of pipelines. Jenkins again is an old tool and was not designed for the new container age technologies. Jenkins also does not get well with a microservices kind of architecture.

In general Jenkins as a tool still holds value for following use-cases:

You are using an on-premise solution.
Most of your codebase is hosted in-house.
You have a big team to take care of and manage Jenkins pipelines dedicatedly.
You are tight on budget, and looking for free open-source CI solutions.
You still follow the legacy monolithic approach and are away from microservices , containers etc

Why we should look for Jenkins alternatives?

Jenkins is the most popular and widely used CI/CD tool , and an important reason for that is, Jenkins is free.

Now lets us try looking at some of the challenges when using Jenkins:

Jenkins has an old and outdated interface and not as user friendly as compared to other tools.
As a regular Jenkins user, it is very common to get challenged and frustrated by some missing functionality,a lot of maintenance issues, broken pipelines, Jenkins dependencies and not to forget scaling issues.
Also with the world moving towards AI/ML based solutions, Jenkins still does not provide analytics for the end-to-end metrics.
Jenkins doesn’t allow a developer to see the commits done by another team member, readily.
When using Jenkins,a common problem is tracking and accountability of the changes made by the various members of the development team.All the traceability is only at the code level provided by a source control tool like GIT.

Hence we should be on a lookout for other possible Continuous Integration solutions because of these drawbacks of Jenkins.

So we are trying to share some Jenkins alternatives that are definitely worth exploring in 2021.

Here is a list of Jenkins like tools for the developers to give a try in 2021 :

1. Buddy

Buddy is the open-source CI/CD tool. It removes the chores of configuring and managing Jenkins with a smart UI-UX. Buddy makes it easy to build, test and deploy quality software faster( with an average time of 12 seconds)

Features

- Full docker & Kubernetes support
- Supports all programming languages and frameworks.
- Integrates with AWS, google cloud, azure, digital ocean, etc.
- 15-minute configuration via GUI
- Offers 46X more frequent deployments compared to workflow with no automation.
- Offers a customizable & reusable build and test environment.

2. Cruise control

It’s both a continuous integration tool and an extensible framework to create a custom continuous built process. Cruise control is written in JAVA. it has many plug-ins for a variety of source controls. It can also be used to build technology and notification schemes like emails and instant messaging.

Features

- Allows to build multiple projects on a single server.
- Provides support for remote management.
- Integration with many source control systems like VSS, CSV, SVN, git, hg, perforce, etc.
- Integration with other external tools like NAnt, Ndeopend, Nunit, MSBuild, MBunit, Visual studio

3. GoCD

GoCD is a free and open-sources CI/CDserver.It helps organizations easily model and visually complex workflows. This CI tool allows continuous delivery & offers an initiative interface to build CD pipelines.

Features

- Numerous plugins to enhance functionality.
- Visualize end-to-end workflow in real-time with a value stream map.
- Keep orderly configurations.
- Supports parallel and sequential execution.
- Allows pipeline configurations to be reused.
- Increases reliability of pushing to production & empower QA teams by offering easy rollback.

4. Urban code

It’s a CI/CD application by IBM. Urban code releases management tools to help organizations to deliver better software faster. It combines robust visibility, traceability, and auditing feature into a single package.

Features

- Reduce deployment features.
- Drag-and-Drop automation.
- Enterprise level security and scalability
- Increase the frequency of software delivery.
- Hybrid cloud environment modeling.
- Creates a reusable lifecycle template to help describe the path of a build.

5. CircleCI

It’s a cloud-native CI tool that oversees the setup, security & maintenance of instances. It is a flexible CI tool that runs in any environment. This tool reduces bugs and improves the quality of the app.

Features

- Supports multiple languages like C++, JAVA script, .NET, PHP, Python & Ruby.
- Allows selecting a Build environment.
- Improve Android & iOS store ratings by shipping bug-free apps.
- Provides an interactive dashboard with critical insights on the build.
- Offers automatic upgrades & instance access to feature releases.
- Optimal caching and parallelism for fast performance.

6. Buildkite

It’s a reliable and cross-platform CI tool. It makes it easy to run automated builds on your infrastructure. Buildkite is an open-source platform for running CI pipelines that are fast, secure & scalable.

Features

- Treats infrastructure as code with scheduled builds, separate agents.
- Offers source control integration chat support & doesn’t need source code access.
- Runs on a wide range of Operating systems.
- Offers stable infrastructure.
- It can run code from any version control system.
- It can integrate with tools like slack, campfire & Hipchat.

There are many other alternatives for Jenkins which work effectively as well. You can experiment with different tools to improve your work and making it more reliable. Choose the best Jenkins alternative for your team and workflows.

The post Jenkins is getting Old, so what are the alternatives in 2021 ? appeared first on DevopsCurry.