Everything you need to know about DevOps

The DevOps movement is gaining momentum. It's here to stay, and it's going to affect how we develop software. But what exactly is DevOps? Whether you're doing development or operations work, being able to participate in a DevOps environment can help you be more efficient and increase quality.

In this article you will understand the:

• what exactly is DevOps, Intro, and Overview & DevOps Definition
• Traditional Application Release Process
• Challenges DevOps tries to solve
• DevOps Concept
• DevOps in Practice Become a DevOps Engineer
• DevOps vs SRE- How does Site Reliability Engineering fit into DevOps

What is DevOps?

The DevOps definition has evolved over time, but the original concept remains the same.

"It is an approach that emphasizes communication and collaboration between developers and IT operations teams to improve the flow of information between them, as well as their ability to deliver applications."

DevOps is a way of thinking about IT that helps you deliver value to your customers faster. It allows you to get code from your developers into production. and it also helps you understand how your infrastructure is performing.

The term “DevOps” was first coined by Patrick Debois in 2009. The name DevOps is a compound word for development and operations. The project aims to bring together the software development side (developers) and the IT operations side (IT Ops) to work together in a more collaborative way.

Traditional Application Release Process

Before DevOps became popular, many companies had a very traditional application release process where all changes were handled by one team – typically an IT Operations team – which worked independently of other teams such as Development or QA teams. This often led to conflicts, misunderstandings, delays, or even failures when moving code from Development into Production environments due to a lack of communication or miscommunication between teams with different priorities and goals.

Challenges DevOps tries to solve

You will learn some of the most difficult problems that DevOps has attempted to solve.

The gap between development and operations teams

It’s very common to see developers and operations people working. Developers create new features while the operations team deploys them on production environments. Each team works independently, without considering the other team's needs. This leads to increased complexity in software development processes and reduces productivity levels.

A lack of coordination between teams

Coordination between teams is essential for any business process. If you want your business process to run smoothly, then you need good coordination between various departments within your organization. However, it’s not possible for each department to coordinate with each other directly; instead, a mediator needs to take care of this process for both parties involved in the project.

Improving quality

When developers can work directly with their operations team, it becomes easier for them to identify bugs in their code before they reach production. This also makes it easier for them to fix those bugs once they are identified — again before they reach production.

Increasing visibility into production

When developers have access to real-time data about what's happening in production, they can make better decisions about what needs fixing or improving. This ensures that changes made in production do not negatively impact customers' experience with the product or service being delivered.

Increases Speed

Developers want to get their products out, but they can't do that if they're waiting on manual testing or deployments that take days. DevOps speeds up these processes by automating them.

DevOps as a Concept

DevOps is a concept that helps to describe the collaboration of software developers and information technology (IT) operations professionals. DevOps is a set of processes, methods, and tools that help bridge the gap between software development and IT operations.

The DevOps movement has grown out of the Agile software development method. It aims to deliver working software in short cycles and to quickly adapt to changing customer requirements. DevOps began as an approach for automating testing and deployment of applications but has since expanded to include areas such as continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), continuous integration/deployment (CID), configuration management, monitoring and measurement, incident management, and problem management.

DevOps is a cross-functional role. It encompasses people, processes, and technology

The role of the DevOps Engineer can be summed up as follows:

• DevOps is the link between software development and IT operations to help deliver products faster while maintaining high quality.
• DevOps engineers have a deep technical knowledge of both software development and IT operations.
• They have the skills to develop and maintain the infrastructure that supports continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
• They also have an understanding of software development processes, tools, and workflows.

How Do You Become a DevOps Engineer?

The first step to becoming a DevOps engineer is getting some experience working in IT. You don't need to be an expert coder (although it doesn't hurt), but you do need to know how servers work and how software gets deployed onto servers. If you have experience as an administrator or system administrator, that's even better.

Next, you should get some hands-on experience with automation tools like Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, or Chef. These tools allow you to write scripts that tell your server exactly how everything should be configured, so when new code is pushed out by developers, it can automatically be deployed without manual intervention.

What is SRE?

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a specialized form of software engineering that focuses on reliability, availability, scalability, performance, and other qualities required to maintain large-scale services. SREs are responsible for monitoring services, fixing bugs, and deploying new features. They also work closely with product management and engineering teams to ensure the best possible user experience.

SREs vs DevOps

SREs are often confused with DevOps engineers because they both work on software systems that run at scale in production environments. But there are some key differences between them:

• SREs have an operations mindset while DevOps engineers have an engineering mindset
• SREs work on global infrastructure while DevOps engineers work locally using local services
• SREs focus on reliability while DevOps engineers focus on agility

Well, this guide has reached its conclusion. I hope that it has provided you with valuable information on both DevOps terminology, concepts, and how the DevOps culture and principles can be implemented.

I'm sure you have learned a lot from this article. I just wanted to thank you for reading. I hope to see you again!

If you are restless to investigate DevOps, take a gander at my other blog on: Become A DevOps Engineer: The Ultimate Guide

Hi! I am Safoor Safdar a Senior SRE. Read More. Don't hesitate to reach out! You can find me on Linkedin, or simply shoot me an email at me@safoorsafdar.com