Top 10 Exciting DevOps Projects for Beginners [2024]

DevOps is a new trend in the world of IT. It is a methodology that emphasizes the collaboration between software developers and platform operations guys. The practice helps to shorten the cycle time for development, test, and deployment without any compromise on quality. Let’s take a look at some of the DevOps projects that are driving the DevOps methodology today.

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What are Devops projects?

In my experience, DevOps projects integrate software development (Dev) with information technology operations (Ops) to shorten the system development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.   

These projects emphasize collaboration, automation, and integration among teams, enabling organizations to develop, deploy, and improve products faster than traditional software development methods allow. By adopting DevOps practices, teams can efficiently address the integration of development and operations, ensuring rapid, reliable, and repeatable processes. This approach not only boosts efficiency and speed but also significantly enhances the scalability and security of applications.

Why Devops projects is Important?  

From my perspective, DevOps projects are crucial because they foster a culture of collaboration between development and operations teams, breaking down traditional silos. This cooperation accelerates software delivery, enhances product quality, and increases customer satisfaction by ensuring rapid, reliable deployment of updates.   

DevOps also emphasizes automation, which reduces the potential for human error, improves efficiency, and allows teams to focus on more strategic tasks. Moreover, it supports a continuous improvement cycle, enabling businesses to respond swiftly to market changes and maintain a competitive edge. DevOps is not just a methodology but a strategic asset that drives innovation and operational excellence.

Best Platforms to Work on Devops projects

In my professional journey, I’ve found several platforms that stand out for working on DevOps projects. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are top-tier cloud services offering extensive infrastructure and tools for automation, scalability, and integration, making them ideal for DevOps practices. Jenkins, an open-source automation server, facilitates continuous integration and delivery. Docker, for containerization, allows consistent deployment across any environment, enhancing portability and efficiency. Lastly, Kubernetes excels in container orchestration, ensuring applications run smoothly across clusters. Collectively, these platforms offer a robust ecosystem for deploying, managing, and scaling DevOps projects, catering to the dynamic needs of modern software development.    

Top DevOps Projects

1. Git

Git is one of the best DevOps tools which is distributed multi-user version control system that tracks changes in the source code through all the stages of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Git was initially developed in 2005 by Linus Torvalds but has come to limelight only recently with the growth of DevOps concepts.

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Git works on a client-server model with each Git directory on each client computer serving as a complete repository of code with a full history of the code and the track of versions. The code is maintained on client machines independent of network connectivity. The repositories are then hosted on a hosting server so that the source code is made accessible to everyone across the team.

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As and when team members develop new code, it can be pushed to the repository and can be synced with the code of other team members.

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2. Jenkins

Jenkins is an open-source automation project that is used to create an automation pipeline for most tasks around software build creation, testing, and deployment. Furthermore, Jenkins has several plugins at its repository to support the build, deployment, and automation of any project.

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Jenkins is pretty easy to install and configure. It can be installed as a native package or brought up as a docker image or run from a portable installation on a machine with Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Jenkins is designed and developed with a master-slave architecture such that it can efficiently distribute work across multiple machines so that you can work as a team to build applications, test them quickly and deploy them to production then and there.

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3. ELK Stack

Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana stacked up together into the popular ELK stack is the most popular open-source log analytics solution. ELK stack helps to collect logs from different applications, services servers, network devices to store them in a centralized location.

This storage is provided by the Elasticsearch index component of the ELK stack. Once stored, you can use it for analytical purposes like business intelligence, troubleshooting, monitoring, security and audit, application performance, etc. The main components are 

Elasticsearch: Elasticsearch is a highly scalable analytics engine that has full-text search capabilities. It is an open-source solution developed in Java with industry-standard capabilities. With the RESTful Web interface, it provides a distributed, multi-tenant architecture so that multiple users can use the platform at once. 

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Logstash: This component is a centralized logging system that also helps in log enrichment and parsing. You can parse specific fields in the logs and send them to the Elasticsearch index to save the records. 

Kibana: Kibana is used for data visualization and to perform analytics on the data indexed on the Elasticsearch index. You can search and view data that is stored in Elasticsearch indices. You can create interactive dashboards to visually display the analyzed data in different forms like tables, forms, maps, and charts.

4. Ansible

Ansible is open-source configuration management that can provide task automation, infrastructure orchestration. It can also help in continuous deployments, also known as zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible is agentless, which means that it doesn’t require any software component or agents to be installed on the client machine.

Ansible communicates to the client machine through the Secure Socket Shell (SSH) protocol or Remote Procedure Call (RPC) protocol. Ansible is developed in Python. It uses YAML scripting for playbook coding.

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5. Kubernetes

Kubernetes is a container orchestration system designed for automation of container deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Cloud Native Computing Foundation now maintains it though Google originally developed it. Kubernetes ranks as one of the topmost among the required skills for cloud and DevOps. Check the list of skills required to become a DevOps engineer.

6. Nagios

Nagios has been around for a while, and it is popular for it’s monitoring capabilities. It keeps monitoring applications and servers, and it case of failure, Nagios would send alerts to the team automatically. Teams can then quickly take action so that downtime is minimized and impact on business is reduced.

Nagios can also store the logs of a different failure event. This helps to forecast outages from errors and detect security threats. Nagios supports both agentless and agent-based architectures. Nagios has a hugely supportive community that contributes to the application. As of now, there are thousands of plugins and add-ons. Nagios allows users to develop their own monitoring services by using scripting languages like Python, Perl, shell scripts, etc.

7. Docker

Docker is a leading container platform that virtualizes operating systems to provide light-weight containers for hosting applications and services. Unlike the traditional method of virtualization, which virtualizes the hardware, containerization technology virtualizes the operations system so that different containers reuse the OS libraries and utilities. So basically, containers share the operating system kernel with other containers such that each container runs as an isolated process in its userspace. 

8. Gradle

Gradle is a one of the popular build automation tool that can be used to automate builds across multiple languages and platforms. The main languages supported are C, C++, Python, Java, Groovy, etc. It has support for different IDE (Integrated Development Environments).

Gradle can go well with various continuous integration CI tools like Jenkins (discussed above), IntelliJ, and Eclipse. The way Gradle is developed makes it extensible and customizable in different ways. Gradle reuses outputs from previous executions so that only inputs that are changed need to be processed. This feature, along with the parallel task execution technology, makes Gradle considerably faster.

9. Puppet

Puppet is yet another configuration management tool like Ansible. Puppet automates the process of infrastructure provisioning, implementing the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) methodology. This allows safe and fast deployment of applications on the platform or infrastructure.

10. Selenium

Selenium is an open-source software testing tool for web applications. It consists of Selenium IDE, which is a Firefox add-on for testing web applications using record-and-play. A WebDriver component communicates to the web browser to automate the tests. Other Selenium components are Selenium Remote Control, Selenium Grid, and the Selenium client API.

Conclusion

 In My experience, engaging in “DevOps projects for beginners” is a pivotal step for professionals looking to dive into the DevOps field. These projects, widely utilized by companies and engineers, are foundational to implementing DevOps practices effectively. They offer a hands-on approach to understanding the integration of development and operations, emphasizing automation, continuous integration, and delivery.  

Aspiring DevOps professionals can benefit greatly from exploring the PG Diploma in Full Stack Software Development Programs offered by IIIT-B & upGrad. These courses provide insight into DevOps tools and methodologies and offer numerous job opportunities in the DevOps field. Taking advantage of these programs and educational pathways can significantly improve your understanding and skill set, preparing you for a successful career in DevOps. Check out the devops jobs opportunity after the course.