What is DevOPS?

What is DevOPS?

As be a DevOPS engineer more than five years in the past, I was always asked what is DevOPS or what is a DevOPS role or what should a DevOPS Engineer do? Or even question like how to be a good DevOPS?
What? How? should be the most two frequently questions from almost all organizations.
As I am working with Amazon Web Service for a long time with my DevOPS career, I tried to get answers from AWS guys frist as they have a special section about AWS DevOPS, also they have AWS DevOPS certificate cources, even though I never try such cources.
This is the first page said about DevOPS on AWS DevOPS to answer "What is DevOPS?",
DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.
DevOPS Model
Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams are no longer “siloed.” Sometimes, these two teams are merged into a single team where the engineers work across the entire application lifecycle, from development and test to deployment to operations, and develop a range of skills not limited to a single function. Quality assurance and security teams may also become more tightly integrated with development and operations and throughout the application lifecycle.
Obviously, AWS guys think DevOPS is a complex thing combined with culture, practices and tools. This definition is not complete right or not, but I agree that DevOPS should be not only some tools, some ideas or some processes, in the first of all, it should be a team / organization culture. Second, it should come with processes, tools. DevOPS should be a term for a group of concepts introudced by the technology community.
DevOPS, mind or theory or culture first, then tools, technology and procedures, then practice and more. Recognize the culture of DevOPS should be the first lesson for anyone who wants to go with DevOPS. Here, remember, DevOPS is NOT JUST culture, but don't forget the culture.
DevOPS is agilty. But the DevOPS agilty should rely on platforms, technologies and procedures. If the infrastructure platform is out of date, how could you apply aglity operations that DevOPS requires? For example, your traditional infrastructure Data Center can not hold such requirement at all, provisoning 1,000 nodes for quick test and terminating them after working time. Before AWS period, we already did similar requirements by VMWare vSphere platform, but for a single data center, it is still required large scale base infrastructure which can not affort by most of SME organizes. An elastic infrastructure platform here should be base. "Agile infrastructure", "Agile Operations", "Agile Development Process", those concepts are always mentioned in DevOPS drive team.
DevOPS is NOT NoOPS. DevOPS merges the developer and operation borders. But it is not said you don't want a stable and reliable monitor anymore. In the other hand, you want a much more requirements for monitoring, alerting and even auto recovery. There is always misunderstanding in this domain. Merging the border of Dev and Ops, it is not said OPS quit, it is because OPS evoluting to DevOPS, or I like the word "Elastic OPS", "Dynamic OPS".
DevOPS might be starting from about more than 10 years ago, at the time I was working in eBay.com as automation operation engineer or tools engineer. The technique community required things like,
a cross-disciplinary community of practice dedicated to the study of building, evolving and operating rapidly-changing resilient systems at scale
In that old days, operation team and development team are totally separate teams. We perbit development guys touch our production at all. New service go live with certain period as release plan or something similar. In eBay.com, it is called trainand roll out every two weeks.
But DevOPS is something deifferent comparing above traditional model, DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support
Also, DevOPS brings, DevOps is also characterized by operations staff making use many of the same techniques as developers for their systems work
DevOPS always discuss such topics,

  • Infrastructure Automation – create your systems, OS configs, and app deployments as code.
  • Continuous Delivery – build, test, deploy your apps in a fast and automated manner.
  • Site Reliability Engineering – operate your systems; monitoring and orchestration, sure, but also designing for operability in the first place.
This is the first time I tried to answer some questions always asked in the past years. I think I will start a topic on this to show more understanding about DevOPS then.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

RPM Build Tips!

Linux block device commands

关于.rpmnew和.rpmsave文件