7 Exciting DevOps Projects for Beginners

If you are new in the field of DevOps and want to try some real-life projects but not getting the ideas. Then you have landed at the right place. This article will give 7 exciting ideas for trying projects.

DevOps (development and operations) is a collaborative methodology that makes it easy for enterprise development and IT operations teams to work together. DevOps practices ensure reliable software outcomes in the IT development cycle. These days, quality assurance and even security teams are closely linked to development and operations. As such, it is sometimes referred to as DevSecOps.

Although to acquire a skill, practicing what you have learned is very important. A soccer player has to make various moves to score well in a match. Singers have to train their vocal cords to wow the audience. Similarly, a DevOps engineer has to work on various projects to get a great job. If you’re currently on your DevOps journey, read on for some of the best DevOps projects.

Table of contents

• What is DevOps?
• DevOps projects
  • Continuous integration with AWS cloud
  • Create a simple web server
  • Create an app monitoring dashboard
  • Build an API-based Flask application
  • Load Balancing for Static Website Using Nginx
  • Jenkins remoting project
  • CD pipeline using AWS

What is DevOps?

The term DevOps combines the terms development and operations and is intended to describe a collaborative or shared approach to tasks performed by an organization’s application development and IT operations teams. In its broadest sense, DevOps is a philosophy that fosters better communication and collaboration between these teams (and others) within an organization. In its narrowest interpretation, DevOps represents the adoption of iterative software development, automation, and delivery and maintenance of programmable infrastructure. To know more about DevOps you can follow our DevOps series.

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Checkout: Kubernetes vs Docker: Understanding the Difference

Must explore: Different Types of Docker Containers

DevOps projects

1. Continuous integration with AWS cloud

Pipelines allow you to automate your software deployment process and launch automated builds to deploy to Amazon EC2 instances. Based on the release process model. Continuous integration can streamline your software development process and improve the quality of your software using AWS services.

We can use AWS CodePipeline, a service that builds, tests, and releases code whenever it changes. Use CodePipeline to choreograph each stage of the publishing process. Other AWS services connect to CodePipeline as part of your setup to complete your software delivery pipeline. 

AWS CloudTrail tracks, and audits AWS API calls to help you troubleshoot any issues.

AWS CodeDeploy is used to deploy the build to a test or staging environment.

2. Create a simple web server

We first need to create a basic HTTP server to create this project. Then return different types of content in XML, JSON, or CSV. Then you have to either provide the HTML as a string or load the HTML file and provide the content. Finally, you can route using the HTTP request object. This simple project will prepare you for some of the more advanced tasks on this list. Designing an architecture is involved building a scalable application. That can handle many users and traffic while maintaining high availability and reliability. Automation in software development and deployment process can be achieved using DevOps practices and will enable rapid iteration and scaling of infrastructure.

3. Create an app monitoring dashboard

Create a dashboard where you can monitor your application. Monitoring here means network monitoring, application performance, security, logs and errors. Instrument your server and use monitoring tools to add instrumentation to your app.

Additionally, measurements should be collected and added to the tool. This task will teach you how time series databases and monitoring tools work. Prometheus, Graphite, Statsd, Nagios, and Grafana are useful tools.

• First, choose your monitoring tools. Some popular options include Graphite, Grafana, Prometheus, Statsd, and Nagios. Choose the tool according to the specific needs of your application.
• Instrument your servers and applications to collect the necessary data. Add code to your applications that send data to the monitoring tool. For example, add code to track memory and CPU usage.
• Collect measurements: The data collected by the monitoring tool is typically stored in a time-series database, which allows you to query and visualize the data over time.
• Visualize data on a dashboard.

Also read: CI/CD Pipelines with a real-life example: Implementation and best practices

Also read: Free DevOps Courses Online

Must explore: DevOps Online Courses & Certifications

4. Build an API-based Flask application

Develop an API-based Python Flask application to get a hands-on understanding of the REST API, database connection configuration, and a bit of his UI (HTML and Javascript).

In this project, you need coding skills, API knowledge and Kubernetes experience to create and deploy an API-based application to coconuts. The first step is to choose the programming language and create a based Application. The next step is to set up continuous integration, delivering CI/CD pipelines to the repository. This ensures the testing and deployment of the changes made to the application.

5. Setup Load Balancing for Static Website Using Nginx

Load balancing is an important aspect of managing high-traffic websites, as it helps distribute incoming traffic across multiple servers, ensuring better performance, availability, and scalability. In this DevOps project, we will explore how to set up load balancing for a static website using Nginx. Nginx is a popular web server that reverses proxy that can handle many concurrent connections and provide efficient load balancing. By the end of this project, you will clearly understand how to configure Nginx for load balancing, set up multiple web servers, and ensure high availability and fault tolerance for your website.

6. Jenkins remoting project

The Remoting project is an open-source project maintained by the Jenkins community. It is developed as a separate library from Jenkins, which allows other projects to use it as well. Remoting can be used as a standalone library to enable communication between Java applications running on different machines, not just Jenkins agents.

The Jenkins Remoting Project provides a stable and secure way to connect Jenkins nodes. This project aims to provide a set of APIs and tools developers can use to control Jenkins servers remotely. It’s use-case are, for example, spreading a load of a build across multiple nodes, running jobs on nodes with different architectures and isolating nodes from each other to provide a higher level of security.

This project is open-source and available on GitHub. Well documented and easy to get started with. Additionally, the project provides several sample configurations that can be used as starting points for new deployments. That’s why the Jenkins Remoting Project is an excellent choice for those getting started with DevOps.

7. CD pipeline using AWS

A CD pipeline automates the process of getting code changes from development. There are many ways to set up your CD pipeline, but a common option is to use Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS DevOps projects provide many tools that you can use to build your CD pipeline, including CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and CloudFormation.

CodePipeline is a service that allows you to coordinate steps in your CD pipeline, including Building and deploying code. CodeBuild is a managed build service that you can use to compile, test, and package your code. CloudFormation can provision and manage AWS resources such as EC2 instances and load balancers. If you want to learn how to set up a CD pipeline using AWS, you should always pay attention to the details of DevOps courses like this one, as many great tutorials are available online.

Conclusion

For beginners in DevOps projects, it is recommended to start small and gradually increase complexity, automate everything possible, use version control, collaborate effectively, and embrace a culture of continuous improvement. By following these principles, beginners can master DevOps and succeed in their projects. If you liked this article, then do share and like it.