Cloud-native technologies allow you to more efficiently deploy your applications at the enterprise level. But the learning curve can be steep, and it may be confusing to figure out the world of cloud-native tech and establish how you’ll make your development workflow as efficient as possible.
A working knowledge of DevOps technology is crucial to effectively start your deployment and creating a sustainable and manageable workflow. Read on as we walk through the necessary factors of DevOps environments you need to know to simplify your cloud-native development.
The main components of DevOps architecture
To understand DevOps technology, remember the foundational principles of Kubernetes (K8s) as a DevOps tool.
- K8s can combine capabilities and host a large variety of DevOps tools.
- K8s becomes your application’s operations framework.
- You can use K8s as a container orchestration tool to deploy and orchestrate containers that belong to your business application.
K8s also serves as the abstraction layer between your infrastructure and applications. This universal infrastructure abstraction allows you to easily run your tools, abstracts you from specifics of each cloud or infrastructure provider and provides API and declarative tools to define your application structure.
Yet, as good as this abstraction is, it can make it easy to miss all of the architecture within your system. The underlying system architecture is always present regardless of the abstractions, frameworks or development tools you use. It’s very useful to understand these architecture components when simplifying your cloud-native development workflow and managing your applications.
Here is an overview of general architecture elements as it relates to the DevOps field.
Infrastructure
Even with the best abstractions, there is always infrastructure “under the hood.” Underneath infrastructure abstractions, there are:
- Virtual or physical machines
- Load balancers
- Storage
- Network
These components are always present even if you are running applications and managing the cloud using serverless frameworks.
Frameworks
Frameworks are a set of tools that sit between your application and infrastructure. It is possible to use multiple frameworks in a given project. Those frameworks, or runtime environments, include:
- Container runtimes
- Orchestrators
- Service mesh
- Serverless
- App server
Operations tools
In addition to frameworks, your DevOps architecture includes a number of operations tools to use in real-life production. These tools are responsible for:
- Identity Management (IDM)
- Provisioning
- Log collection
- Monitoring
Development/CI/CD tools
The next layer of infrastructure is a variety of Development/CI/CD tools. These can include:
- Version Control System (VCS)
- Continuous Integration (CI)
- Continuous Delivery (CD)
- Binary repositories
Project structure
Lastly is your project structure, which includes all of your:
- Source code
- Binaries
- Development and release processes
When you put these architecture components and abstractions together, you get the essence of K8s:
Kubernetes = App Ops Framework + Application Abstraction + Infrastructure Abstraction
Why should you understand your DevOps environment?
In many cases, you may not have to manage all of these tools because they may live in a fully managed environment where everything runs as a managed service in the cloud. Even then it is useful to understand the concepts behind that managed stack to make sure that you can optimize applications running on it.
In other cases, you might be hosting the full stack, in which case it’s even more important to understand the DevOps architecture. If you are hosting a full-stack, you’ll want to formulate it as much as possible so the stack is easy to recover, more robust and self-documenting, and formally expresses your infrastructure, ideally as a source code.
If you’re curious about how using a managed service can simplify your cloud-native development workflow, contact Kublr.