Advanced Certificate Course in DevOps

DevOps Concepts: DevSecOps, Containerization

Challenges faced/Improvements needed: The product owner and management team wants you to improve the maturity of the automated pipeline by focusing on security in each stage. Based on their inputs, your team has come up with the following ideas:

• Improving code checks at static code analysis stage for code vulnerabilities to ensure fixes are done before the code is processed further by the CI pipeline.
• Using SBOM creation and analysis tools to make sure all dependencies are checked for vulnerabilities.
• Using container hardening techniques to make sure the docker images used/created are sufficiently secure and do not have any high-risk vulnerabilities.
• Secure communication between K8s pods (e.g. with TLS)
• Adding PKI certificates to administer the K8s cluster.

Objectives:

Simulate the current setup with the project code provided and explore the options for improvements planned. Create a prototype for the proposed solutions and compare it with the existing setup.

Provide your analysis and observations regarding the benefits achieved with the proposed solution and why you have chosen the particular solution/tools.

Present the solutions which are feasible to be implemented right away, and your implementation of the same. Also propose any options which can be implemented in the future to further improve the maturity of the DevOps setup and pipelines.

Probable Tools:

Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, Syft, Snyk, Dockle, Docker Bench Security, Vault

DevOps Concepts: Continuous Monitoring

Challenges faced/Improvements needed: The operations teams who are supporting the application have informed your team that they are unable to easily figure out any issues or failures in the microservice deployments and need better tools/solutions for continuous monitoring.

The product team has also come to you requesting to create some dashboards which will give them a better visualization of how the application is performing which will help them make better business decisions.

Your team has decided to create a solution to setup continuous monitoring for your K8s app deployment, keeping in mind the following points:

• The ops team should be able to collect logs, traces and manage metrics for your production infrastructure (servers), containers, app endpoints and databases etc.
• It should be possible to troubleshoot complex interactions, by tracking the progress of a request or transaction through the microservice environment.
• A user-friendly visual dashboard should be available to make it easy for ops to view, filter, analyze important metrics and set up alerts.
• Security monitoring should be enabled to ensure any potential threats to the infrastructure are detected.
• It should be possible to set up custom application logs and view usage statistics and other KPIs in graphical format so that the product team can get useful business metrics.

Objectives:

Simulate the current setup with the project code provided and explore the options to fulfill the requirements given by the ops and product teams. Create a prototype of the proposed solutions and provide your analysis and observations regarding the cost, capabilities etc. based on which you have chosen the particular solution/tools.

Probable Tools:

Kubernetes, Istio, Prometheus, Grafana

DevOps Concepts: Continuous Delivery for Microservices based Architecture

Challenges faced/Improvements needed: As the code is now being split into multiple code projects, you need to update the version control repository and CI build pipeline connected to it Also, with frequent code releases, the code quality is not being maintained. Even if the CI build is in place, more code smells and vulnerabilities get introduced with every iteration. You need to strengthen and improve the build process considering the following points:

• There is a need for stronger quality check rules to be incorporated by creating custom quality profiles and quality gates.
• Code coverage of unit tests should be monitored and the build should not pass if coverage is below 80%
• Include linting as part of the dev process to test and fix any code quality issues at the developer end through the IDE before it goes through the CI build.
• Add performance/load tests as part of your CD pipeline
• As the test environments are maintained manually, it is a tedious process to provision and set up the servers for every release. There is a need to automate this process and connect it to the CICD pipeline

Objectives:

Simulate the current setup with the project code provided and explore the options for strengthening and improving the pipeline to resolve the current issues faced by the team. Create a prototype to the proposed solutions and compare it with the existing setup.

Provide your analysis and observations regarding the improvements proposed w.r.t. cost, speed and code quality, and why you have chosen the particular solution/tools.

Probable Tools:

GitHub, Jenkins, JaCoCo, Cobertura, Coverage.py SonarQube, SonarLint, Ansible, JMeter

DevOps Concepts: Disaster Planning and Recovery

Challenges faced/Improvements needed: As the application release is planned in the near future, your team has been advised to ensure that you have the necessary preparedness in case of disaster. It should consider the following requirements:

• Setup deployments in 2 AWS regions for high availability
• You must be able to configure scheduled backups, trigger ad-hoc backups
• The recovery plans should allow to restore from backups with minimal interruption to services, especially the primary/critical ones
• In the worst case scenario, you should be able to migrate the cluster to a new cloud or on-premise environment.

Objectives:

Explore the 3 different options by which you can do a redeployment:

• manual redeployment
• scripted redeployment
• fully automated deployment

Prototype and compare the solutions you have selected w.r.t. capabilities, time, cost, manual effort needed. Which recovery strategy will your team be able to successfully implement right now, and what can be implemented as future steps to be better prepared in case of a disaster?

Probable Tools:

Kubernetes, Argo Rollouts, Velero

DevOps Concepts: Disaster Planning and Recovery

Challenges faced/Improvements needed: Recently your product owner has asked the dev team to create multiple versions of some new features which need to be A/B tested with the end users before they decide on the final version. For this purpose, they have asked your team to look into:

• Implementing Canary deployments so that the multiple versions can be tested with some percentage each of the end users before being rolled out to all users.
• Creating a consolidated view of some business KPIs and performance metrics to understand the usage statistics for a particular feature version, preferably in a UI dashboard form.
• Setting up a rollback strategy to scale down a version update in case the release was unsuccessful or the canary test did not produce the expected result.

Objectives:

Simulate the current setup with the project code provided and explore the options for implementing the tasks requested by the product owner. Create a prototype to the proposed solutions and compare it with the existing setup.

Provide your analysis and observations regarding the deployment process, infrastructure setup/tool updates proposed w.r.t. capabilities, cost, visibility and why you have chosen the particular solution/tools. Will the proposed solution be robust and flexible enough if another type of deployment strategy needs to be adopted by the business?

Probable Tools:

Kubernetes, Istio, Argo Rollouts

DevOps Concepts: DevSecOps, Microservices architecture

Challenges faced/Improvements needed: The product owner and management team wants you to improve the maturity of the automated pipeline by focusing on security in each stage. Based on their inputs, your team has decided to incorporate improvements at various stages:

• Improving code checks at static code analysis stage for code vulnerabilities to ensure fixes are done before the code is processed further by the CI pipeline.
• Using SBOM creation and analysis tools to make sure all dependencies are checked for vulnerabilities.
• Using container hardening techniques to make sure the docker images used/created are sufficiently secure and do not have any high-risk vulnerabilities.
• Secure communication between K8s pods (e.g. with TLS)
• Adding PKI certificates to administer the K8s cluster.

Objectives:

Simulate the current setup with the project code provided and explore the options for improvements planned. Create a prototype for the proposed solutions and compare it with the existing setup.

Provide your analysis and observations regarding the benefits achieved with the proposed solution and why you have chosen the particular solution/tools.

Present the solutions which are feasible to be implemented right away, and your implementation of the same. Also propose any options which can be implemented in the future to further improve the maturity of the DevOps setup and pipelines.

Probable Tools:

Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, Syft, Snyk, Dockle, Docker Bench Security, Vault

Challenges faced/Improvements needed: Your team has decided to move to a pure GitOps setup and wants to decommission the Jenkins server to make the CICD workflow simpler and easy to manage from one platform.

All the existing automation and quality checks implemented should be migrated to the Git server. The pipeline configuration should also be available as code so that it is easy to update, replicate and maintain.

Apart from that it would be good to have infrastructure automation added to the pipeline to set up and maintain the production environment.

Objectives:

Simulate the current setup with the project code provided and explore the options for the migration/update planned to the setup. Create a prototype for the proposed solutions and compare it with the existing setup.

Provide your analysis and observations regarding the benefits achieved with the proposed solution and why you have chosen the particular solution/tools.

Probable Tools:

GitHub, Jenkins, GitLab, Terraform