Release night
Once a year, a software team releases a huge update. It takes all night. Dozens of changes go live together, and when something breaks, nobody knows which change did it.
A DevOps team releases small changes many times a day. When something breaks, they know exactly which one to look at.
Key words
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| DevOps | a way of working where the people who build a system and the people who run it work together |
| Continuous integration | joining everyone's changes together often, with an automatic build and test each time |
| Continuous delivery | keeping the system always ready to release, so a release is one safe step |
| Continuous deployment | sending every change that passes its tests live automatically |
| Pipeline | the automatic chain of steps from a change to a release |
| Automated testing | tests that a computer runs by itself, every time |
| Monitoring | watching a live system to see how it is doing |
| Logging | keeping a written record of what a system did |
| Agile | working in small steps, with regular feedback |
The cells students fill in are left blank in this preview.
By the end of this lesson
Note
I can explain continuous integration, continuous delivery, automated testing, and monitoring and logging, and show how they fit into one pipeline.
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3 questionsYour answers are marked here and are not kept. A college account keeps every student’s marks.
What DevOps is
DevOps joins two groups: developers, who build the system, and operations, who run it. They used to work apart and blame each other. In DevOps they share the work and the goals.
The aim is to deliver in an agile way: small steps, fast feedback.
Continuous integration
Continuous integration (CI) means every person joins their changes into the shared system often, even many times a day.
Each time, the system is built and tested automatically. A clash or a bug shows up within minutes, while the change is still fresh in mind.
Continuous delivery and deployment
Continuous delivery keeps the system always ready to release. A person presses one button, or approves, and it goes live.
Continuous deployment goes one step further. Every change that passes all its tests goes live by itself.
Both rely on a good pipeline and good tests.
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3 questionsYour answers are marked here and are not kept. A college account keeps every student’s marks.