What is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development and IT operations. It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. DevOps is complementary to Agile software development. In fact, several DevOps aspects came from the Agile methodology. DevOps is all about the unification and automation of processes, and DevOps engineers are instrumental in combining code, application maintenance, and application management. All of these tasks rely on understanding not only development life cycles, but DevOps culture, and its philosophy, practices, and tools.

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.

What is cloud-native?

Cloud-native is a modern approach to building and running software applications that exploits the flexibility, scalability, and resilience of cloud computing.

Cloud-native encompasses the various tools and techniques used by software developers today to build applications for the public cloud, as opposed to traditional architectures suited to an on-premises data centre.

Why cloud-native DevOps?

Both cloud-native and DevOps movements are on the rise. Reports and Data predict that the global DevOps market will grow from $4.49 billion in 2019 to $17.27 billion in 2027. What is more, the COVID-19 pandemic significantly influenced cloud adoption, mainly due to the shift to a remote-first workforce. Many companies are turning to cloud-based business activities in order to support some of these new business opportunities/services demands. In an annual CEO study conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value in 2021, 56% of CEOs said they need to aggressively pursue operational agility. 64% of organizations shifted to a more cloud-based activities and 85% of CEOs still believe that on-premises infrastructure is a critical component of their hybrid cloud strategy. For detailed information on the study, please refer to Sources section at the end of this blog.

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power

Companies are embracing a hybrid multi-cloud strategy to modernize their critical business applications and processes. Red Hat OpenShift helps to simplify and accelerate the client application modernization journey.

With OpenShift on IBM Power, clients can drive innovation and get all the benefits cloud-native DevOps has to offer.

IBM Power platform provides …

• Efficient scaling of cloud infrastructure
• Do more (software, workloads) with less (hardware/servers)
• Proven security and reliability

Enterprises can modernize their applications incrementally using OpenShift on IBM Power. It provides...

• Open and integrated approach
  • VMs and OpenShift containers co-reside on same server
  • Build modern cloud-native applications alongside traditional applications co-located on the same server
• Build once, deploy anywhere
  • For optimized data and workload placement across hybrid multi-cloud landscape
• Culture and skill transformation
  • Best practices, proven methods, and tools

With OpenShift you can manage an entire application lifecycle, share your cluster resources with multiple users/teams in a controlled fashion using resource limits and use RBAC (role based access control) to create multi-tenant environment where each tenant's data is logically separated from other tenants to achieve workload isolation.

A cloud-native DevOps approach maximizes agility with continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). DevOps engineers are always looking to automate the CI/CD workflow to minimize human error, improve time to deliver software, and produce consistent software artifacts.

OpenShift has many features to achieve DevOps style automation for your application. You could use the Source-to-Image (S2I) feature to build your containerized application directly from source code or using Dockerfiles and achieve continuous deployment of your application using GitHub webhooks integration with OpenShift. The main advantage of using S2I is building reproducible container images and providing ease of use for developers, so that developers can focus on application / business logic without worrying about deployment complexities. If your OpenShift cluster runs in a restricted environment (e.g.: behind an enterprise firewall) which blocks external event notifications like GitHub webhooks, causing the continuous deployment workflow to break, you can use a web-based webhook payload delivery service to achieve continuous application deployment.

In the recent past, OpenShift Pipelines has become the de facto technology to achieve CI/CD automation. Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines is a CI/CD solution based on the open source Tekton project. The main objective of Tekton is to enable DevOps teams to quickly create pipelines for activities involving simple, repeatable steps. This article, Build and publish Docker images from a GitHub source using Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines, provides a quick overview on how to achieve DevOps style continuous deployment for your Docker images using OpenShift Pipelines. Last but not the least, this article, Deploy a 3-tier application on Red Hat OpenShift, can help you understand how a typical multi-tier (3-tier) cloud-native application can be rapidly deployed on OpenShift in a flexible and secure way.

Summary

Red Hat OpenShift is a trusted Kubernetes enterprise platform that supports modern, hybrid-cloud application development and provides a consistent foundation for applications anywhere—across physical, virtual, private, and public clouds. Red Hat OpenShift is a single platform for application innovation that lets organizations operate consistently across any infrastructure with full-stack automated operations and streamlined developer workflows, empowering teams to innovate continuously and outpace rising customer expectations. So, stop thinking and start innovating! Let’s Create!

Additional Resources

1. Explore OpenShift on IBM Power learning path
2. OpenShift on IBM Power datasheet
3. OpenShift on IBM Power – IBM Redbook

Sources

1. “The 2021 CEO Study. Find your essential: How to thrive in a post-pandemic reality.” IBM Institute for Business Value. February 2021
2. “COVID-19 and the future of business: Executive epiphanies reveal post-pandemic opportunities.” IBM Institute for Business Value. September 2020
3. Payraudeau, Jean-Stéphane, Anthony Marshall, and Jacob Dencik. “Extending digital acceleration: Unleashing the business value of technology investments.” IBM Institute for Business Value. October 2021
4. The Key to Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Strategy: An Annual Forrester Consulting Study Commissioned By IBM, January 2020