What Is Ansible? Why Do We Need To Learn Ansible?

At present, there are many automation tools available in the market that automates multiples tasks such as :

• System Configurations
• Software Provisioning
• Application Deployment
• Intra-Service Orchestration

and many other IT needs. One of the tools available for these purposes is Ansible.

Ansible is a very simple IT automation engine that automates provisioning, configuration, application deployment, and Intra-Service Orchestration. This tool is very simple to use yet powerful enough to automate many complex multi-tier IT applications.

This software has several properties that make it easy and way powerful in the IT automation fields which are :

1. Open Source Software
2. Easy to use as it uses YML which is so easy to understand
3. Written in python that makes it easy to understand
4. It is agentless that means it does not require any software installed in the node system
5. Highly Scalable
6. Easy Installation and Configuration

Unlike Puppet or Chef, it doesn’t require an agent to be available on the remote host. Instead of this Ansible uses SSH which is pre-installed on almost all the systems you want to manage. The other feature is that it’s written in Python which needs to be installed on the remote host. This means that there is no need to set up a client-server environment before using Ansible, you just need to run it from the host computer and need not to worry about the client-server relationships. There are some other requirements though, for example, if you want to do something related to git on a remote machine a git package need to be first installed on the remote machine.

The ansible does not require that you must learn all the commands and syntaxes to accomplish a certain task but you just have to specify what state you want the system to be in and Ansible will completely look after it.

Why do we need to learn Ansible ?

The server systems are the underlying foundation of our applications and thus, like our applications, they should be version controlled, tested and automated. As such we need to look for a configuration management tool that would solve our needs with automation in them.

Configuration management tools are not new, they have been around for some time, but their complexity always made their adoption a difficult process. This is where Ansible is far more powerful, it has made the learning curve easy enough so that it is easier to use Ansible than to do manual stuff or scripting of shell, even for local installations and configurations.

We these days use Ansible for any task or project that involves processes that require repetition and a consistent environment, such as provisioning of IoT devices and server infrastructure, application installation and configurations, and application deployment.

Source: http://www.itlearn360.com/what-is-ansible-why-do-we-need-to-learn-ansible/

What Is CI/CD? How Important Is To Integrate Automated Testing In CI/CD Environment?

Continuous Integration(CI) and Continuous Delivery(CD) is the collection of best practices that enables development teams to deliver the changes in code more frequently and efficiently.

Through the Continuous Integration, development teams integrate the small changes with share repository and check the version of the code frequently. The technical goal of Continuous Integration is to establish a way to build and test applications with consistency. With the consistency, development teams are more likely to integrate code changes with shared repositories frequently, which leads to better collaboration between teams and better software quality.

The major goal of Continuous Integration is to refine the integration process into a simple, repeatable development task that will reduce the overall build cost and reveal defects in the cycle easily. Success in CI will depend on changes in the culture of the development teams so that there are frequent and iterative builds, and eagerness to deal with bugs as they are found much earlier.

On the other hand, Continuous Delivery means that new features and fixes (done by development teams) pass through the develop-build-test cycle and automate the delivery of new changes to the selected infrastructure environment, which can be production environment or development environment or testing environment because development teams work in different environments. But when smaller changes are delivered to the production environment frequently, then it can increase the risk at large-scale and may result in the breaking down of systems.

Continuous delivery depends on a deployment pipeline by which the development team automates the testing and deployment processes. This pipeline is an automated system that executes a set of test suites against the build.

In each segment of the deployment pipeline, the build may fail a critical test and alert the team members or it continues on to the next test suite, and the successive test passes the result to the next segment of the pipeline. The last segment of the pipeline will deploy the right build to a production-equivalent environment.

Now the question is how important it is to integrate automated testing in CI/CD environment?

When smaller changes are delivered to the production environment frequently then some questions occur like how do you test your app efficiently, How can you be sure of the released software’s quality, How do you manage/plan test that fits within budget and resources?

If we think about automated tests, the question is ; how often and when should you run automated tests?

the answer is as often as possible and as quickly as possible. 

Both answers suggest doing Continuous Integration.

CI allows us to run automated tests after each commit and send feedback with results to developers that their code changes didn’t break any existing unit tests. Good automated tests should cover all functionality that are developed at the end of every sprint, or at least most of them. If we run automated tests only at the end of each cycle/iteration, probably there will be no time to fix issues.

What if a new feature has a bigger impact on the application? For that, we need to perform regression tests continuously throughout the iteration. These regression tests inform the team whether a code change failed one or more of the tests developed across all functional areas of the application.

Here is the list of the top 8 Continuous Integration tools:

Jenkins

TeamCity

Travis CI

Go CD

Bamboo

GitLab CI

CircleCI

Codeship

Blog Source URL: http://www.itlearn360.com/what-is-cicd-how-important-is-to-integrate-automated-testing-in-cicd-environment/

Why AWS certifications are important for IT professional

AWS is announcing the new technologies or we can say IT services day by day in the IT market whether we talk about big web applications or we talk about game zoning. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a set of cloud services which are being used by startups, big companies, and government agencies. AWS lets companies buy powerful virtual machine cheaply and use these machines whenever they need them to handle traffic, to store large data, videos or to power a database. We must say that AWS is the piece of cloud infrastructure that has triggered the fire in the current tech boom.

AWS is providing the platforms to all industries to build their applications or to handle big data. If we define AWS in other words:
“AWS has changed the view or face of the IT industry with its cloud services.”

Big companies like

• Netflix
• Samsung
• Yelp
• Airbnb
• Time Inc
• Nokia
• Novartis
• HTC
• Intuit
• Johnson & Johnson
• Kellogg Company -SAP ERP Migration
• Lafarge etc

moved their data centers to AWS because of reasons like

• Reduced costs
• Scalability
• Speed and Agility
• No capital expenses
• Self-service model

The way, companies are adopting or moving to AWS, it is generating the jobs which require AWS certified candidates or having AWS hot skills. Companies are looking for those candidates who are able to work or manage the AWS services like handling traffic, disaster recovery, high availability of servers, backup solutions, autoscaling, orchestrations with DevOps tools, Secure infrastructure etc.

If we talk about the salary of AWS certified candidates, “AWS Skills are in high demand and pay top Money”. According to Global knowledge study, these are top paying certifications of 2017 –

 

With that being said, please remember that simply getting the AWS certification doesn’t mean that you will be making the annual salary indicated above. Many other factors are at play here, including your other IT skills, working experience etc. The fact is, employees/candidates those have the AWS’s skills, will have a great positive impact on their career.

AWS divided the certifications into 3 tiers:

1. Associate tier:

• Certified Solutions Architect Associate
• Certified Developer Associate
• Certified SysOps Administrator Associate

2. Professional tier:

• Certified Solutions Architect Professional
• DevOps Professional

3. Specialty tier:

• Security
• Advanced Networking
• Big Data

If you are looking for online training for AWS certifications or want to switch your career with AWS skills then please visit below link:

http://www.itlearn360.com/courses/cloud-academy/

If you are looking for AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate online training then please book your seat by click on the following link:

http://www.itlearn360.com/self-paced-courses/aws-certified-solutions-architect/#bookdemo

For more information please reach us at training@itlearn360.com or call us at +1-800-543-5571

Source URL: http://www.itlearn360.com/why-aws-certifications-are-important-for-it-professional/