Start your DevOps journey with these 11 helpful resources

Since there are a lot of tools and terms to master, getting started in DevOps can be challenging. We've compiled a list of 11 useful and practical resources to help you quickly get up to speed.ere are many benefits of using an end-to-end DevOps platform, we're focusing here on two major gains: visibility and actionability.

If you're new to a DevOps team or consider yourself a DevOps beginner, we have a guide that will help you get off the ground. This guide demystifies DevOps by outlining its core principles, development practices, and the online resources and DevOps tools crucial for navigating the software development lifecycle in DevOps environments. This guide also features an example of how DevOps is changing the game for one large financial investment bank. And it offers information on how working in DevOps can affect your career.

Whether you're initiating your role within a DevOps environment or aspiring to delve into the field, beginning your journey requires an understanding of DevOps practices and the development practices they entail. Here we walk you through how to take the first steps on this exciting new path.

In a DevOps platform, users are better able to communicate, plan work, and collaborate by using epics and issues. Epics are an overview of a project, idea, or workflow. Issues are used to organize and list out what needs to be done to complete the larger goal, to track tasks and work status, or work on code implementations.

For instance, if managers want an overview of how multiple projects, programs, or products are progressing, they can get that kind of visibility by checking an epic, which will give them a high-level rollup view of what is being worked on, what has been completed, and what is on schedule or delayed.

Users can call up an epic to quickly see what's been accomplished and what is still under way, and then they can dig deeper into sub-epics and related issues for more information. Issues offer details about implementation of specific goals, trace collaboration on that topic, and show which parts of the initiative team members are taking on. Users also can see whether due dates have been met or have passed. Issues can be used to reassign pieces of work, give updates, make comments or suggestions, and see how the nuts and bolts are being created and moved around.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (known as CI/CD) are the cornerstones of DevOps. Here's what you need to know about CI/CD for beginners. And here's a video tutorial that will help you, too.

Whatever software you develop and whichever languages you use, you'll soon run into Git, a source code management system that helps programmers work collaboratively. Brendan O'Leary walks you through what you need to know.

GitOps is an important operational framework in DevOps, giving you a way to take best practices, like version control, compliance methodologies and CI/CD, and apply them to infrastructure automation and application deployment.

To understand even more about GitOps and what it can do for your DevOps team, check out this webcast of a panel discussion with pros from Weaveworks, HashiCorp, Red Hat, and GitLab talking about the future of infrastructure automation.

The practice of DevSecOps - or development, security, and operations - focuses on integrating security into the DevOps lifecycle. It's an approach to culture, automation, and platform design that makes it a shared responsibility, among everyone on the team, to create code with security in mind. By factoring in security this way, it increases efficiency and deployment speed, while also preventing, catching and solving bugs and compliance issues before code goes into production.

For more information on DevSecOps, check out these three best practices for implementing better DevSecOps. And for information on why developer-first security is important, here's more guidance for you.

Want to know more about how to shift left? This webcast will help you understand how to make it happen.

There are several things you, and your teammates, can do to make your DevOps team elite performers. There's a big difference between being an elite performer and low performers, affecting your speed to deployment, efficiency and your corporate agility. Check out the advantages, as well as tips on how to get there.

If you're looking to figure out how to unify efforts between projects and DevOps teams, and to share specialized knowledge and guidance, you need to learn about documentation. This blog will walk you through what documentation is all about and what it can do for your DevOps efforts.