What is DevOps? by Andrii Kamchatny

NEW YORK - Nov. 23, 2017 - PRLog -- Yes, I do know that if you google this query, the search will give you 91,300 links. And if you read all entries from the first page with results, you can succeed in an average interview for a Junior DevOps Engineer position (just kidding – you can't). But I still dare to write a 91,301th article on the subject, where I will try to formulate my understanding of DevOps, what it is for and how you can use it.

What urged me to write this article:

• This year I have been involved in 8 or 10 projects as a Configuration Manager (another strange word) and could see that not all Project Managers understand what DevOps is and how you can benefit from implementing DevOps on the project.
• Over the last 3 months I have been taking part in selecting candidates for positions of Intern DevOps Engineer and Middle DevOps Engineer, and questions related to DevOps culture have caused the applicants most difficulties.
• I've been asked to J

It is very likely that after reading this article the readers might feel a certain dissonance between what they have read and what the DevOps Engineer is doing on their team. Still, the DevOps culture is more about interactions than about tools, continuous integration or vertical or horizontal scaling of servers.

This article will tell about nothing but DevOps culture. My next article might be about something more familiar – about DevOps engineers.
 SO, WHAT EXACTLY IS DEVOPS?
The classic definition goes as follows:

DevOps (a compound of English words 'development' and 'operations') is a set of practices aimed at active interaction between software development specialists and software operation and maintenance specialists and integration of their working processes into one another.

It is based on the idea of close interdependence of development and operation of software and is intended to help companies to create and update software products and services faster.

It is believed that the DevOps movement was born in 2009 as an association of many  adjacent and complementary communities: Velocity Conference, with brilliant talks of John Allspaw and Paul Hammond "10 Deploys A Day", an "Infrastructure as code" approach (Mark Burgess and Luke Kanies), "Agile infrastructure" (Andrew Shafer) and "System administration in Agile" (Patrick DeBois), "Lean Startup" approach of Eric Ries with his idea of continuous integration, as well as a wide availability of cloud and PaaS technologies.

To put it simply, DevOps is a culture that can create a consistent and logical proactive networking system of all participants involved in development-testing-implementation-operation of a big system or service.

In an ideal world, this system would look something like this:

Implementation of this methodology adds one more abstract level to company management (synchronization and coordination of all stages of building your large team).

This approach can be shown as the following graph:

Initially, DevOps had nothing to do with a specific job in a company. Many still claim that DevOps is not a job title, but a culture, which ensures the closest communication between all participants of a project.

But, as time goes, DevOps has naturally moved from concepts of "culture" and "ideology" to a list of "jobs". The number of vacancies with this word in the title is growing rapidly. DevOps are expected to have a wide range of skills, such as system administration, programming, using cloud technologies, and automation of a large infrastructure.

This means that it's not only necessary to know programming, but also to understand the operation of networks, operating systems, virtualization, to be able to provide security and fault tolerance, along with a dozen of other skills: from basic and time-tested iptables and SELinux to fresh and trendy Chef or Docker technologies.
 WHAT DEVOPS IS FOR
Transition to DevOps is intended to decrease the number of conflicts, which arise when developers are oriented at meeting business needs, adding new functions, and increasing usability of applications, while maintenance and support specialists are traditionally focused on reliability and security of IT system functioning. Therefore, developers must be taught about operations, and maintenance specialists – about faster and more efficient satisfaction of business needs.

The main technical concept of DevOps is the following: as processes of infrastructure interaction become automated during development, testing, deployment and monitoring, companies can remove many operational defects and improve development and operation processes. In practice, the main questions are which tools should be used and what resources are worth investing in each given area of DevOps.

"DevOps Cookbook" and "The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win" describe the cornerstone "Three Ways" principles all the DevOps patterns can be derived from:

The First Way emphasizes the performance of the entire system as opposed to the performance of a single team or department.

The focus is on all business value streams that are enabled by IT.

The Second Way is about creating the right to left feedback loops. The goal of almost any process improvement initiative is to shorten and amplify feedback, so that necessary corrections could be made continually.

The Third Way is about creating a culture that fosters two things: continual experimentation that requires taking risks and learning from failure, as well as understanding that repetition and practice is the prerequisite to mastery.

According to many customers, the value of the described approach is that it allows getting the big picture of the development model, including all interested parties, clearly defined processes, and integration mechanisms.
Read full article https://sigma.software/about/media/what-devops