Oracle Cloud – Changing the tool chain for DevOps

Organisations used to make use of a waterfall based strategy with a clear split between development and operations. A model in which developers where tasked to develop new functionality and improve functionality based upon change requests in a waterfall based strategy. Operations departments where tasked with running the production systems with the code developed by the development teams without a clear feedback channel to the developers. With adopting new ways of working and with the rise of DevOps a change is happening in companies of all sizes.

Development and operations departments are merged together and form DevOps teams more focused around a set of products from both a development as well as a operational run point of view opposed to being focused on development only or operational support only.

The general view and the general outcome of this model is that by merging operational and development teams into one team responsible for the entire lifecycle of a product the overall technical quality of the solution as well as the quality of the operational use improves.

Transition challenges

Traditional organized teams making the transition from a split operational and development model to a DevOps model will face a number of challenges. One of the most challenging parts of this transition will be the culture shift and the change of responsibilities and expectations for each individual in the team. People tasked with operational support tasks will now be required to also work on improving the solution and extending functionality. People who are used to only work on developing new code are now also expected to support the solution in a run phase. 

Another challenging part of the transition will be the adoption of a totally new way of working and a new toolset. When working with the Oracle Cloud in a DevOps way you will have the option to use all the tools out of the standard DevOps tool chain. 

Changing the tool chain

When moving from more traditional way op IT operations to a DevOps operational model you will see that the tool chain is changing. The interesting part of the DevOps chain is that most of the common tools in the DevOps tool chain are open and most of them are open source.  Secondly, there's no single, one-size-fits-all DevOps tool. Rather, the most effective results come from standardizing on a tool chain that maps directly to best practices such as version control, peer review and continuous delivery all built on a foundation of managing infrastructure as code and continues delivery and deployment.

There is a large set of tools which are commonly used in different setups of DevOps both in situations of conventional IT, private cloud, public cloud and hybrid cloud. The combination of tools and how they are used in a specific DevOps footprint is primarily driven by the type of applications that are maintained, the level of expertise of the DevOps team and the level of integration with already present tools in the tool chain.

DevOps tool chain in the Oracle Cloud

A growing part of the DevOps tool chain is by default available in the Oracle Public Cloud, enabling your DevOps teams to start using it directly from moment one. When using the Oracle Public Cloud and consuming for example PaaS and IaaS services and building a DevOps Tool Chain around the Oracle Public Cloud and other public and private clouds it is wise to look into the options provided by Oracle. 

As can be seen in the above image the Oracle Developer Cloud Service already provides a large set of DevOps tools out of the box. In addition to this the Oracle Computer Cloud Service will provide you IaaS service and provides you the ability to run Oracle Linux instances which you can use to run whatever DevOps tool you need and integrate that with the tools that are already available in the Oracle Developer Cloud Service.

Monitoring and Orchestration 

As a large part of DevOps revolves not only around developing code and deploying code however also includes constant monitoring of your environment and the orchestration of the end-to-end flow a large part of the DevOps team time is spend on this. Within the open and opensource tool chain a lot of different tools can be found who are all capable of doing so. 

DevOps teams can decide to make use of those tools as well as that the can make use of services provided from within the Oracle Cloud. Tools provided by the Oracle cloud for this can be used for DevOps taks in the Oracle cloud as well as in other clouds or on-premise deployed solutions. 

As an example, Oracle Orchestration Cloud Service can take a large part of the tasks for the end-to-end orchestration within the DevOps model. Next to this, within the Management portfolio of the Oracle Public Cloud portfolio tools for application monitoring, infrastructure monitoring and log analytics can be found. Tasks also commonly being given to solutions like the Elastic Search stack or to Splunk, 

The Oracle Public Cloud picture

If we combine the above in on picture we will see that we can run the entire DevOps tool chain in the Oracle cloud. This includes the needed feedback from continuous monitoring by leveraging the products from the Oracle Cloud monitoring portfolio. 

As you can see, Oracle Cloud is not the only target when running the DevOps tool chain in the Oracle Cloud, you can use this as a central tool location to develop and operate solutions deployed at any location. This can be the Oracle Public Cloud, a private cloud or another non-Oracle Public Cloud.