Adapting DevOps Culture: What is DevOps and how to explain it to a non-DevOps?
The term “DevOps” is the most heard buzzword in the tech industry that means a lot of different things to a lot of people. DevOps started gaining popularity in 2009 and has grown immensely since then. Companies want to adapt to the DevOps culture but do not know where to start and, therefore, struggle to adapt to the DevOps culture.
In this article, we will be explaining what DevOps is, why DevOps matters, adapting DevOps culture and starting the DevOps journey.
Without the complications and information overload, this article will take a simple approach to explain DevOps and how it can truly help any organization.
What is DevOps
DevOps or “Dev” and “Ops” is the short form of Development Operations. Most beginners think that DevOps is a technology or tool or a programming language that they can learn. But DevOps does not work like that! DevOps is a way of working for an organization so that new features reach to the users as quickly and smoothly as possible.
Why DevOps matters
Back in the day, developers and ops professionals implemented different operating environments during the development of a new product. The developers were focused on writing code for their development environment and which was not identical to the production environment. When the code was finally deployed into the production environment, occasionally unforeseen errors or problems occurred. However, with evolving technology and the demand for frequent delivery of softwares, caused problems at both ends of the spectrum.
To ensure that the valuable time of developers and operations can be saved and utilized for their core jobs, new full-time roles of DevOps were born. The DevOps teams are responsible for taking care of the application from the moment it leaves the developer’s machine and reaches QA, staging, and production systems. The core responsibilities of DevOps are to build an automated flow for code coming from the developers’ machine to go through the process of building, testing, transforming, packaging, and deploying to various QA, staging, or production systems. This process of bridging the gap between development and operation activities is known as Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD). Other responsibilities include release management, automation, and integration.
Adopting DevOps Culture
Adapting a DevOps culture requires a new mindset, new tools, and new skills. In simple words, DevOps goes beyond methodologies. It’s about the practices, processes, and team collaboration to reduce complexity and deliver value to customers. Hence, it is essential to understand the other applications of DevOps when adapting its culture.
Be it the integration of marketing and sales tools, automating the hiring and onboarding process, or having analytics and reports – DevOps insights are always valuable.
DevOps engineers have a strong understanding of system architecture, application layers, networking protocols, as well as access to developer toolset to practice programs/scripts. Thus, allowing them to automate workflow, integrate tools, collect logs and diagnostic data, create checks for application monitoring, write templates to build, maintain, scale, or destroy cloud environments (on-demand). Moreover, DevOps are also proficient with configuration management tools like Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt, etc. to manage operating system and application configuration in the overall systems.
Additionally, DevOps engineers have a good understanding of big data, relational and non-relational databases, caches, queues, file storages, and various forms of unstructured data. They are a big help in building data lakes and warehouses, scale resources for data requirements, implement tools to analyze data, or even combine the results of the system in meaningful dashboards to provide a live insight. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is one of the significant aspects of DevOps, which will be in our future blogs.
Starting DevOps journey
Companies are interested in DevOps, and it seems unlikely that the trend will reverse itself anytime soon, as everybody wants them. Nevertheless, the DevOps teams you hire will require a proper direction from the company to get provable results. Once they are familiar, they will bring new and innovative ideas to the table.
DevOps can seem overwhelming at first. The key is to start with a proper hierarchical structure and roadmap. We recommend that the DevOps team should be kept separate from the regular IT team and must be reportable to someone who is above the Development and Operations departments such as CIO, CTO, Or the Directors. They must be a part of the company’s research and development (R&D) team and involved in technology decision making processes.
Conclusion
That’s the scoop on DevOps. As you can see, adopting DevOps culture is not just about how frequently and efficiently a software company can perform its releases, but it is also about modernizing IT operations.
Hopefully, this article will help you become more aware of the DevOps. Now that you’re armed with these insights and want to adopt this culture, you should find the pain points and the manual processes which cause delay/disruption in operation and planning your roadmap. In the upcoming articles, we will expand more on building the roadmap for DevOps and tackling each of the important roadmap items.
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