Perhaps you’re interested in pursuing a career in DevOps, or maybe you haven’t yet given it a thought? Either way, let’s establish what exactly “DevOps” is, and its function within the business may validate your decision to pursue this career. Or, It may spark a light bulb moment that a career in engineering may be the correct path for you!
What is DevOps?
The term DevOps was coined by Patrick Debois approximately 11 years ago. This term has since become widely accepted by IT and Software teams around the globe. It sums up the methodology behind operation and development engineers working together from design to development. More importantly, DevOps increases an organisation’s ability to deliver applications and services at a high velocity! This is done to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market, in a speedy and sufficient manner.
However the industry may define DevOps or how to achieve DevOps success; it will undoubtedly entail a journey. Here are some fundamental questions; you may be asking yourself on the way:
What Are the Challenges DevOps Solves?
Before “DevOps” became the buzzword in the industry and companies started shifting their approach, a designated department was in charge of gathering business requirements for a software program and writing code. Once completed, a separate QA team would test and give the go-ahead to operations to deploy, if requirements were met. The deployment teams could be fragmented further into groups such as networking and database. This “pass and move on” technique between independent teams can often lead to a bottleneck.
These challenges are now addressed through the establishment of cross-functional teams and collaboration in order to share responsibility for not only system maintenance but ensuring software runs and that system with quality feedback.
With that said, What Is the Goal of DevOps?
Ultimately it aims to improve the communications and effort between the various stakeholders, from planning to delivery and eventually automation of the delivery process to:
- Improve deployment frequency
- Achieve faster time to market
- Lower failure rate of new releases
- Shorten the lead time between fixes
- Improve mean time to recovery
According to the 2015 State of DevOps Report, “high-performing IT organisations deploy 30x more frequently with 200x shorter lead times; they have 60x fewer failures and recover 168x faster.”
Why Are Your Colleagues Embracing DevOps?
Developers
According to New Relic (2018) “Automated provisioning is a big win for programmers because they can stand up a development environment themselves with no paperwork, no lengthy approval cycles, no waiting for IT to provision a server— no lost time.”
Developers who work in an environment that provides the necessary resources, such as, computing power, storage, network capabilities and applications, it can significantly enhance the way they work. Leading to more creativity, innovativeness and more confidence to try multiple options, run different scenarios to test their code more thoroughly.
Operations
Operations management is often seen as the backbone of a business. The goal of any operations team is to develop and implement procedures that make the business processes as efficient as possible. The outcome of this would be the conversion of materials and labour into goods and services, that maximise the profit of an organisation.
They can be sticklers for process and system stability, but this is not a bad thing! Caution always needs to be observed, especially with new technology and developments, as simple software updates can take down a system in seconds.
A DevOps approach negates this, and the increased inclusion of developers improves system stability. Furthermore, by releasing smaller and more frequent releases introduces less variability into the system. The significant benefit of this not only lowers the risk of a catastrophic failure, but even better is that you can implement these changes during work hours and, therefore, have the necessary staff available to solve problems. Reducing that time spent working on weekends when developers themselves need to debug.
