It can be quite overwhelming to pick a technology when planning your first steps towards your career in IT, especially looking into DevOps.
DevOps is not tied to a specific technology – it's rather an engineering practice that has emerged from Agile* due to the strain between developers and operations engineers.
*The Agile methodology is a way to manage a project by dividing it into several phases. It involves constant collaboration with the project stakeholders and continuous improvement at every stage. From the start teams cycle through a process of planning, executing and evaluating.
This makes DevOps more focused on the people and the process of an organization, rather than the specific tools or technologies that the engineers choose to utilize. The practice has a massive impact the engineering culture of collaboration, ownership and learning with the purpose of accelerating the software development lifecycle from idea to production.
Where does the strain between developers and operations engineers lie?
There are two main problematic areas:
Each team exists in a silo
Developers and operations engineers have different skillsets and experience unique to their work and in traditional organizations information is not shared between them. Instead, code is flung over the mysterious “wall of confusion” from developers to operation folks to deploy and maintain.
There are different criteria for developers and engineers
Developers are traditionally measured for success by the number of features they ship or the number of bugs their eliminate. Operations engineers are evaluated using indicators like site reliability and uptime.
Taking these into consideration, the most common cause of incidents and outages are the new releases of code. Developers want to release more, while operations are motivated to control for error and prevent the devs from deploying bug-filled software.
How does the DevOps approach help this situation?
Reduces interpersonal friction
Removes bottlenecks
Improves collaboration
Increases job satisfaction
Improves team productivity
Apart from the human element, which helps for faster delivery, better functionality and innovation, the technical benefits are:
Continuous integration and continuous delivery
Closely aligned with DevOps, CI/CD removes a lot of the bottlenecks seen in teams that don’t deploy frequently. If you create automated pipelines that pass new code through a robust test suite you will be more confident in your deployments.
Recover faster from incidents
You can’t help it – you will experience a service disruption at some point, no matter how well you have tested your code. Teams who work with the DevOps methodology find solutions much faster through better coordination, open accessibility, shared learning and performance monitoring.
Being more resourceful
DevOps accepts the reality of constraints and helps you succeed within your unique environment
Read more about our upcoming DevOps course here: https://www.scalefocus.academy/devops
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