What is AppOps? More Than Just a Buzzword
What is AppOps?
Developers productivity was always a central point of concern for organizations but with the rise of microservices architecture, it's even more essential to focus on developer productivity because of multiple moving parts. In the fast changing world where everyone is releasing frequently, it's important to note that your method of deployment doesn't become a hindrance.
AppOps is a paradigm where developers don’t need to learn about all the underlying DevOps tools and the underlying tools is abstracted by the platform. AppOps is a way to think of your Kubernetes Infrastructure as a complete suite of applications bundled together, rather than too many standalone applications that needs to be glued together to get the maximum value out of it.
Guide to AppOps
How do we deploy applications on Kubernetes now?
If you think of deploying applications to Kubernetes, the one approach is to take the plane Kubernetes manifest and apply those against the Kubernetes cluster. You might be using gitops and keeping all your YAML manifests in a git repo. Another way is to package the same manifests with helm charts and use helm to deploy the application. This is the traditional way how applications are being deployed over Kubernetes but there are certain challenges with this approach.
Challenges
The above methods are good when you're starting out, but this approach is not good enough when it comes to production or scale. With plane manifest, it becomes hard to manage all those manifests and upgrading them one by one. With helm charts also, it's hard to keep track and to package a complex application with the current templating that helm offers. You can use GitOps to keep track of your manifest and that's a good way, but it lacks when it comes to integrating with other tools.
To address this problem, AppOps is born.
Why it's better?
A unified solution such as AppOps is always better than having a bunch of isolated tools. It reduces the efforts and number of hours that you spend integrating all the tools with others. If you're using say 5 tools on top of Kubernetes and every time you install one, you have to integrate it somewhere with some other tooling to extract the maximum potential of the tool. Your team doesn’t need anyone who’s expert at one particular tool, instead that complexity is handled by the platform itself. AppOps offers coordination between all your DevOps tools and gives you a unified platform experience. Here are some benefits of using AppOps Solution -
- No hassel of setting up multiple DevOps tools
- Management becomes very easy
- Unified Dashboard for Build, test, deploy and debug applications
- Developers don’t have to worry about the underlying complexities of infra
- Low/no knowledge of infra is required
- Don’t have to deal with writing multiple scripts
- Empowers developers with deployments resulting in increased productivity
- Easy infra setup
- Faster application delivery
Cons
Under the hood, you’re still relying on the plane Kubernetes resources like Deployments, stateful sets and others. The AppOps platform cannot do anything if the underlying resources are not running properly. You still require the Kubernetes Administrator in your team that will make sure that everything is running smoothly, then only you will be able to give your developers a unified way to access the resources. Since all the tools are tied together. Kubernetes reconciliation mechanism can restart the workloads but if the error is something like CrashLoopBackOff then you need to debug and solve the error.
Even though there are ample of tools that provide AppOps solutions, some tools stand out and provides the easiest debugging and observability capabilities, just like Devtron. It helps developers to debug the issues and fix it at faster rates, meanwhile DevOps team can work on maintaining the platforms and spending time on increasing the productivity.
AppOps with Devtron
Devtron is an Open-source AppOps platform that allows you to manage your applications smoothly with a single pane dashboard. It provides end-to-end software delivery lifecycle and presents your DevOps in a box, enabling teams to integrate the Kubernetes tools of their choice with Devtron such as ArgoCD, Clair, Kibana, Prometheus, etc.
Devtron empowers the developers to build, test, deploy and debug the containerized workloads in the different environments. It has a marketplace that consists of many applications that can be deployed with one click. It also gives Ops team out-of-the-box dashboard, which is useful in getting a complete overview of your Kubernetes cluster. Essentially, You are getting all your DevOps tool inside a box, and you need to interact with that box rather than interacting with individual components.
The diagram below presents some insights of capabilities of Devtron.
On the left-hand side, the person is responsible for managing all the components and making sure that all are working and functioning properly. But on the right-hand side, you are interacting with Devtron and the tools are coming pre-installed with Devtron and you don’t need to glue them together. You just need to focus on your delivery and productivity and leave everything else on Devtron.