I’ve decided to learn more about DevOps.

I’ve always been a believer in automating repetitive tasks and letting machines do as much of “my” work as they can.  The way I learn best is (as you can tell by the name of my blog) I learn about the topic, I build something from what I’ve learned and I share my experience.

Given that DevOps is a very big topic, it will take more than one or two posts to do it justice.  This post is the first in a series of blog posts, videos and presentations that I plan to create as I learn more.  I think the best place to start is with what I “think” I know now.

What is DevOps?

A couple years ago I was using Jenkins to create a continuous delivery pipeline for a project I was working on.  I was the only one working on the project and after seeing a CD demonstration at a conference I figured I’d give it a try.  I had everything working and I was quite pleased with myself.  Then I started hearing the term DevOps and assumed it was just a term for what I was already doing.  I was partially right.

DevOps is more than just automating the software delivery process, it’s also a cultural mindset.  It’s developers and operations working together throughout the full lifecycle of a project instead of in separate silos.  Since I was working solo on that project I missed out on this aspect.  Currently, I’m not working on any project where I can experience the full cultural aspect so I plan to mentally assume different roles as I work through the learning process.

If you’d like a better definition, there is plenty of material available on the web from real experts.  I only wanted to document what DevOps means to me as I start to learn more.

My current plan.

I have been working on an open source application used for demonstrations and learning called DinoDate.  I am going to build a DevOps process around this application.  My focus will be a bit more on the database aspects of DevOps since the database isn’t always used to its full potential and sometimes even treated like a bucket of data.  I will be building this process using the Oracle Developer Cloud Service against an Oracle Cloud Database and other Oracle Cloud services, as well as other tools such as Jenkins against an Oracle Database on a VM.

Plan Steps:

1. Define the steps to manually deploy DinoDate as is.
   1. Automate the build and deploy process which currently is, run some scripts and scp the code to an Oracle Compute instance where I have already setup Python and NodeJS.
   2. Deploy the NodeJS and Python apps to an Oracle Application Container Cloud instance.
2. Add some open source tools to improve the process.
   • Build script using Gradle.
   • Schema object version control using Liquibase.
   • Unit tests for the PL/SQL using UTPLSQL.
3. Automate creating the infrastructure (DB, Compute instance) from scratch then deploy, test and destroy.
4. Reproduce the entire CD pipeline using Jenkins (or another tool) against a VM.

Once I’m satisfied with my understanding of the tools and workflow, I’ll find a project that would benefit from a DevOps environment and pester encourage them to switch to a DevOps process with an offer to act as the DevOps “expert”.

More to come.

Keep an eye out here and on my YouTube channel for how-to and ‘lessons learned’ posts that I’ll make as I go.  Feel free to post a comment if you see that I’ve already got something wrong or if you have a specific interest you’d like me to focus on as I go.