Whether you are a software developer or a system administrator, it is always important to look at the purpose of DevOps, which is ultimately the purpose of your organization.
“Cloud is about how you do computing, not where you do computing” – Paul Maritz
The landscape of software development has exponentially increased over the past decade. With advances in hardware and software, the pace of innovation has only accelerated. If you do not adopt new technology, you might go out of business.
New tools, languages, frameworks, agile, and micro-services architecture came into the picture to reduce the time to market. You can easily do more than 100 builds a day using the Continuous Delivery (CD) framework.
Virtualization has changed the game for operational teams. You can create a service in minutes and harness the full power of physical (virtual servers) computing resources. If your software is buggy or has a long response time, it will ruin your company’s image.
So, how do you manage everything at this new pace? How do you change old habits in the organizational structure processes to adapt?
You will find out there is no standard definition of DevOps, as there are many different definitions practitioners come up with, as mentioned below.
“DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating in the entire service life cycle from design to development to the production support.” –
Source https://dzone.com/articles/what-is-the-definition-of-devops
Another definition coined by the developers of Chef defines DevOps as:
“A cultural and professional movement, focused on how we build and operate, high-velocity organizations, born from the experiences of practitioners.” –
Source https://www.chef.io/docs/cheflibraries/legacy/devops-kung-fu.pdf
DevOps is a practice. You can use suitable and appropriate tools and software to build, ship, and deploy your application anywhere. The
For measurements to be actionable, there has to be good communication and a culture of sharing and collaborating between all the teams involved. This culture and collaboration lead to the automation which we follow in DevOps.
The main inspiration for DevOps is Agile. In project management, agile is people over process over tools. Even if you have the best developers in the world, if there is no coordination between them, it might lead to a huge loss of time and resources. This lean approach makes you focus on the main goal rather than doing unnecessary, less important work.
Automation is a key component in DevOps. There are many tasks in development as well in the operations team you can automate. It tests your capability to measure how much percentage of your system you have automated!
In a large infrastructure where you run thousands of servers, it’s impossible to do it manually. You have to have automation in place to get the job done.
On the dev site, the agile movement embraces the unit test, integration test, and continuous integration (CI). DevOps imposes these into the deployment process, which breaks the barrier between the dev and ops people.
If you want to improve something, you should have units of measurement. In DevOps, we call all the measurable metrics golden signals. In traditional IT, infrastructure monitoring is the ops’ responsibility.
The measurement actually goes beyond dev and ops. We can use the same measurement tools to record business metrics, customer activity, transactions per second, and even customer happiness which we bring into the umbrella of analytics.
All the teams and stakeholders must know the end goal. First, a shared view and suggestion makes the decision and leads to the path. What are the current practices and flows? Everyone has to participate to make the end goal more concrete.
Shared input generally creates shared responsibility and ownership. People are willing to work together if their thoughts and opinions are being heard. To achieve this, you need to define and measure key performance indicators with the whole cross-functional team.
Traditional IT: The old ways are gone and we must adapt to the new era of DevOps.
Core Conflict: The core services process has to change for the better.
Reliability (Operations): Remove the friction between the stakeholders and make it reliable and easy for shipping.
Speed (Developers): Measure the bottlenecks and improve the speed of the entire process.
Embrace the CI/CD pipeline through Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment.
If Cloud is a new way of computing, then DevOps is the modern way of getting things done. You should leverage new-age DevOps tools for monitoring, application performance management, log management, security, data protection, and cloud management instead of trying to build ad-hoc automation or dealing with primitive tools offered by AWS. Good open-source tools can save time, effort, and money.
DevOps is a culture, a philosophy, and a methodology. Software Development and Operations teams that practice DevOps are more agile, more innovative, and more profitable.
Development and Operations teams can work more productively and efficiently through increased collaboration and greater visibility across teams than ever before.