As the deployment within production environments is getting more and more complicated, various new terms are floating around: Scrum, Kanban, Agile development, Ops, DevOps team, Operations Team, etc. DevOps practice is becoming one of many best practices for managing rapid growth within an organization, so it is only natural to ask, what is DevOps?
DevOps Defined
DevOps culture has a saying, “DevOps is not a profession; it is a methodology.” As a methodology, DevOps is the continuous integration of the processes and missions of the Development Teams with those of the Operations Teams.
In the past, these two teams have often been in conflict. The mindset of the typical software developer is to continuously add new features. However, the deployment of these new features is the job of the Operations Teams. Every code change compromises the integrity and reliability of its configuration management. Or, as the old anti-developer joke goes, “If your system works, it doesn’t have enough features!”
The DevOps approach is to manage the workflows of both sides of the equation. New features need to be implemented and new software needs to be developed, but those processes cannot be done haphazardly for the sake of a few over-zealous developers. Rather, each change needs to be reviewed to see whether or not these changes are necessary and whether or not they will result in more good than harm for the organization. This review needs to be performed by the DevOps Teams or the DevOps Engineer.
Because DevOps Engineers are capable of writing code, however, they can still relate to the perspective of the software developer and the Development Team. Therefore, they can assist in managing the concerns of team members that are used to the old development process and find their workflows being disrupted by the culture change.
Ops Defined
The job of a software developer is relatively easy to understand—writing code. The job of an Operations Engineer, however, might not be apparent to some people.
Operations, or Ops, deals with the day-to-day operations of an organization:
- Deployment of changes in software, security, and policies
- Continual delivery of materials, services, and microservices
- General IT operations including maintenance and repair
- Deployment of site reliability engineers
- Quality assurance
- Security of data
- Cloud security
Because the DevOps workflow often manages the operations portion of an organization, they have to deal with many complex environments simultaneously, especially with the advent of the cloud. THE DevOps tools for managing this complex DevOps environment include:
- CD Pipeline
- Docker
- Silos
- Containers
- Buckets
- Cloud services like Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, etc.
Agile Defined
Because DevOps is not only about the continuous integration of new features with continuous deployment and continuous monitoring between cross-functional teams, the DevOps model is not only about technology “hard skills” like writing code and riding the cloud. The DevOps model is also about the “soft skill” of managing people, specifically cross-functional teams from the Development Teams and Operations Teams.
A good methodology for this soft skill would be the Agile methodology, made popular by subsets like Scrum and Kanban. Agile systems are great for managing the time and workflows of cross-functional teams through a standardized system of time units and scheduling: Epics, stories, backlogs, and sprints.
Scrum and Kanban systems can be facilitated by Scrum Masters and Kanban Masters and brands of Agile development software like Agile Manifesto, Jira, and Click-Up. Agile software development is very useful for maximizing test environments.
The key takeaway from DevOps culture and its methodology is that there has to be continuous integration between continuous development and continuous deployment. During the challenges of the 21st century, things cannot continue as they have before. New tools, hopefully, the right tools, must be developed.