E-Guide

GETTING DEVOPS
UP TO SPEED:
TOOLS FOR
COLLABORATING
WITH IT

GETTING DEVOPS UP TO SPEED: TOOLS FOR COLLABORATING WITH IT

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IT operations tools
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Infrastructure
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DevOps challenges

eedback about a DevOps environment on

the back end is as important to its success

as automated tools are on the front end.
Its also essential that collaboration be
established between app developers and IT ops, especially when
implementing automation to improve upon legacy infrastructures.
In this e-guide, we explore how to make the communication path
between DevOps and IT a two-way street. Discover how tools like
container management, ChatOps, and more can bridge the gap.
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IT OPERATIONS TOOLS ESTABLISH COMMON GROUND

WITH DEVELOPERS
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IT operations tools
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Infrastructure
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Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer SearchCloudComputing

Modern IT operations tools grease the skids of DevOps evolution by maintaining crucial collaboration between developers and IT ops teams.
Infrastructure as code is a well-established means of bringing application development and operations together, but container management tools,
monitoring and logging tools, and ChatOps all increasingly perform similar
functions.
Take a newly released open source container management tool from
Rancher Labs, for example. Its being used at a New York City agency working
to adopt Agile development processes despite a slowly evolving centralized
hosted IT infrastructure.
Docker containers are a logical choice to implement microservices, which
can more quickly be developed and deployed than traditional application
structures. Theyre also important for developers in this environment because
by policy, they dont have root access to the operating system in hosted virtual
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machines, according to Dan MacDonald, architect and principal technical lead

for the agency. But small Linux OS images such as Alpine can be encapsulated
within containers, allowing developers to experiment with libraries and other
tools without needing to wait for access to the VMs OS.
Meanwhile, Rancher allows for catalog-based deployment of containers
by operations people through a graphical user interface that doesnt require an
understanding of the finer points of containerization, according to MacDonald.
The Rancher catalog gives you base functionality, but there are a lot
more features that theyre planning in the future for more automation [in
production], he said. In the meantime, during the test phase, a developer will
create a new image, it gets added to the Rancher catalog automatically, and
when a QA [quality assurance engineer] decides they want to test it, they can
just deploy it at will to any of our environments.
SHARED MONITORING AND LOGGING TOOLS BOOST COLLABORATION

Feedback on a DevOps environment on the back end is as important to its

success as automated tools are on the front end, according to a number of
industry experts. This dictates that IT operations and developers should be
looking at the same monitoring and logging interfaces to quickly identify and
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solve problems.
In the New York City agency environment, the IT ops staff has transitioned
to only managing the servers themselves, and they interface between the app
dev team and the hosting facility to get new hosts that they need or storage-area
network mounts.
Once we deploy and get going, theyll also be actively monitoring the application, MacDonald said. Theyll function as a 24/7 support team and if
anything gets to a critical severity level, that brings in the developers.
For these purposes, MacDonalds team is looking at new IT operations tools
for monitoring and logging, such as Skye Instruments DataHog, AppDynamics products and an open-source utility called Prometheus. Other commercial
products such as Splunk and open-source utilities such as Elasticsearch can be
useful for shared monitoring and logging among DevOps professionals.
Just as operators need to become more like developers, as infrastructure as
code moves closer to reality, developers need to better understand the environments they are deploying on and the operations side of the house.
Developers need to be looking at monitoring, looking at logs, things like
that, and not be responding after a ticket or something like that, said Nirmal
Mehta, senior lead technologist for the strategic innovation group at Booz Allen
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Hamilton Inc., in McLean, Va., who works with government organizations to

establish DevOps culture.

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Infrastructure
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DevOps challenges

CHATOPS GAINS MOMENTUM

While a picture in an app monitoring dashboard can be worth a thousand

words, a human interface shared among app developers and IT operations is
also desirable -- and thats where ChatOps comes in.
Through programs such as Slack and Atlassians HipChat, developers and
IT pros can gather to manage complex deployments and solve problems collaboratively. Its a place for everything from transferring files to making jokes,
and it can be integrated with tools like Jenkins and Chef.
Having all this information in one place improves teamwork, especially for
disparate organizations and groups, said Thomas McGonagle, a senior DevOps
consultant who works with large enterprises on DevOps adoption.
Were heavy believers in ChatOps, agreed Baron Schwartz, founder and
CEO of VividCortex, a database monitoring SaaS provider based in Charlottesville, Va. There are bots in his groups HipChat channel that are listening for
commands like Deploy website to production. When the bot gets that command, it gets the latest website build and runs the commands that will take it
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the rest of the way to production deployment, then report back on whether the
job succeeded or failed.

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INFRASTRUCTURE AS CODE TOPS ITS DEVOPS

CHALLENGES
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Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer SearchCloudComputing

IT operations pros have some work to do to automate the infrastructure
underpinning DevOps initiatives.
While cultural barriers are some of the most daunting DevOps challenges,
IT operations practitioners say that capturing infrastructure as code is the most
significant technical hurdle to supporting modern application development
practices.
Even though configuration management tools such as Puppet and Chef that
enable infrastructure as code have been on the market for years, the concept
can still be difficult for some IT pros to grasp.
Not everyone has yet bought into the concept of taking a traditional rack
and stack infrastructure with management of IPs in Excel spreadsheets, and
automation through Bash scripts and Ruby code, according to Pauly Comtois,
vice president of DevOps for a multi-national media company.

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A lot of our customer organizations barely have operations automated

in any way, echoed Nirmal Mehta, senior lead technologist for the strategic
innovation group at Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., a consulting firm based in
McLean, Va., who works with government organizations to establish a DevOps
culture.
Its 2016, and we should be able to automate those deployments, he said.
Once you do that, you can start to use the exact same tools to manage the
infrastructure that you use for your application code.
A big reason why companies have been slow to automate their operations
is that infrastructure as code work can be more easily discussed than done -legacy applications often werent designed with tools such as Chef or Puppet
in mind.
Third-party software that runs on Windows isnt conducive to automation
via the command line, Comtois pointed out. What makes that really technically challenging is when that piece of software also happens to be critical to
the workflow of that organization, so I cant just go in and rip it out and replace
it with something else.
These issues can be overcome, but some transitions are more painful than
others, he said.
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IT operations tools
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Infrastructure
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DevOps challenges

Security teams also have to be brought on board with managing infrastructure as code, according to Mehta.
Infrastructure as code and configuration management make compliance
a lot easier, but that also means that compliance is no longer a thing that you
do once a year, he said. It gets enveloped in the DevOps process [ just like] any
piece of code needs to go through.
The majority of time spent by IT operations into the foreseeable future will
be transitioning manual processes into infrastructure as code, or automated
steps that follow the same pipeline that application code does, according to
Mehta.
INFRASTRUCTURE AS CODE BENEFITS

So why go through the technical headaches to establish infrastructure as code?

According to experienced DevOps practitioners, its the only way to create
an automated IT infrastructure that adequately supports automated application development testing and release cycles.
In our environment, Jenkins makes many calls into Ansible to build
stuff and deploy and configure it, said Baron Schwartz, founder and CEO of
VividCortex, a database monitoring SaaS provider based in Charlottesville, Va.
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Whatever we want to be automated, we have CircleCI calling a Web service

that pokes Jenkins, which runs Ansible -- it sounds like a Rube Goldberg
machine, but it works well.
Even things the VividCortex team wants to kick off manually use a chat bot
to call into Jenkins and kick off a build job with Ansible, Schwartz said.
Getting IT ops staffs used to the concept of infrastructure as code is key to
securing their buy-in as DevOps is more broadly rolled out in an environment,
according to Caedman Oakley, DevOps evangelist for Ooyala Inc., a video
processing service headquartered in Mountain View, Calif.
Operations doesnt want to see things change unless [it] know[s] what
controls are in place, Oakley said. Everything being written in a Chef recipe
or in cookbooks means [operations] can see what the change was and ... knows
exactly who did the change and why its happening -- and that actually is the
greatest opener to adoption on the operations side.
Ultimately infrastructure as code simplifies infrastructure management,
Oakley said.
Operations can just go manage the infrastructure now, and dont have to
worry about figuring out why one server is slightly different from another, he
said. You can just fire up an instance any way you want to.
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