DevOps workshop at NMIT Bangalore - Day 1

As part of the Campus Connect, My colleague Aditya and I conducted a DevOps workshop at NMIT Bangalore. As covering all the topics related to DevOps was not possible in a single day, we decided to break the entire workshop into multiple smaller sessions spanning across multiple days based on the availability of the students and our work commitments.

Day 1

We reached NMIT college at 8:30 AM and met our point of contact Impana(Assistant Professor at NMIT) who was kind enough to make all the logistical arrangements for us. We were guided to their New Seminar hall and we started setting up for our presentation.

By 9:30 the students had reached the seminar hall( most of them were from 4th and 6th semester). 

We started the session by asking the students what they understood by the term DevOps. To our pleasant surprise, many of the students had a good sense of DevOps and why it has become indispensable in the software development industry.

As most of the students were familiar with the Waterfall model of software development, we began a comparison between waterfall and Agile methodology to make them understand the importance of quick release cycles, continuous feedback and minimum viable product(MVP).

Once they were comfortable with the basic concepts of Agile, we started describing how Agile and DevOps are interrelated and how DevOps helps in achieving the agile development methodology successfully.

We showed them a build cycle using the traditional approach where it took weeks and months, if not years to release a new version of the product. Once the students were able to feel the pain points associated with that approach, we introduced the DevOps release cycle which leveraged Continous Integration, Continous Testing, and Continous Deployment/Delivery how it shortens the release cycle to minutes and hours.

As the DevOps terms like CI and CD are fairly unknown to college students, we explained the meaning of each term and its significance. We used a DevOps pipeline diagram which we used as an aid to explain each stage in the DevOps cycle along with some industry-leading tools like Jenkins, SonarQube, Terraform, Ansible, etc.

We also made emphasis on the fact that the students should focus on learning the technologies and not tools as there are a plethora of tools available in the market and the choice to choose one over the other is dependent on various factors.

 In the end, we showed them a quick demo of a Jenkins pipeline which auto-triggered a build based on code push to Github and ran a Python script which contained a sample function.

It was a very interactive session as there were good questions asked by the students and we thoroughly enjoyed explaining to them the nuances of the DevOps and SDLC.

 I personally felt a sense of nostalgia and life has come full circle for me.
Just a few years ago, I was in the same place as these intelligent, and curious students, on the path to becoming professional developers.

I have been blessed to work with some of the finest engineers in Unisys like Sanket and many others, and I feel that workshops like these will help me pass on the knowledge to the next generation of developers and engineers.