DevOps, the main purpose of DevOps, and what actually a DevOps Engineer does

What is DevOps?

        DevOps is a powerful set of practices, tools, and a cultural philosophy that is bridging the gap between the Software development team (Dev) and Operations team (Ops), which actually speeds the processes and the entire lifecycle of applications and services to be delivered more efficiently and without any disruptions with the help of a cross-functional approach and technologies such as “Docker, Ansible, Jenkins, Vagrant, Prometheus, Grafana, JFrog Artifactory and much more”. As the name DevOps suggests, it contains both Teams (Developers and Operations) merged as one big team to accomplish tasks more effectively and resulting in an advantage for the business and its customers.  

The word “DevOps” was introduced for the very first time by a System Administrator “Patrick Debois” and some refer to him as the “Godfather of DevOps”. He also created the DevOps movement, which all we know today and practice at work with a great pace and attitude for automation and continuous improvement.

DevOps as a culture philosophy represents a change in mindset for the IT culture and society worldwide. In addition to that it enables evolving and improvement the products at a faster pace than organizations, which are not taking advantage of the new concept in the IT world – DevOps.

The main purpose of DevOps

The main purpose of DevOps is for the entire lifecycle of products/applications to be tightly developed and deployed in steps so that the merged team could easily check and get feedback from the customers if any errors/bugs are present. In addition to that deploying applications in steps actually eases the work of the developers, as I said previously they are receiving feedback from the customer, which is happening in merely 1-2 weeks and that feedback is helpful so that the Developer could check what the issue is and what is going on with the application.

The collaboration between the different teams is a crucial and vital part of the mindset of the DevOps Engineer to better achieve business goals. The main purpose of the DevOps Team for me personally is to be more adaptive, and data-driven for alignment with customer and business needs and to make continuous improvement and delivery for the entire business.

DevOps are important and what led to their “creation” as a role in the IT world, is all the new technologies that have transformed the world and its industries, from shopping to entertainment and banking. The transformation lies in the Software which a company is using as a service for their customers. Nowadays Software had become an integral component of every part of a business. With that being said more and more companies interact with their customers through software delivered as online/cloud service or applications from different variety of devices.

DevOps is a development strategy that aims to develop an agile and adjustable work atmosphere in according to the business needs, so the organizations can create and release regular updates to their products quicker than the traditional “waterfall” development model.

The “waterfall” development model is a linear, moreover sequential approach to the software development lifecycle that way to go through a development phase of a product. It split the logical regression into steps.

What actually the DevOps Engineer does?

As we have already said, DevOps as a term comes from merging two teams together – Devs and Ops, bridging the gap of misunderstandings about what think Devs should Ops do and vice versa.

So what actually DevOps does is monitor the overall network infrastructure, more specifically all servers that are crucial to delivering services to the customer. Also in the day-to-day tasks of a DevOps engineer comes collaboration and looking after the services provided by the organization to the customer. One of the main roles of DevOps is to provide feedback from the production environment to reduce ‘Time To Detect’ (TTD) errors and ‘Time To Minimize’ (TTM) them.

In addition to that DevOps must ensure that the SLA is met throughout the whole day so that everything goes smooth and without errors.

DevOps Engineers are searching for ways to optimize the release cycles, remove any time drains, and introduce new ways of moving the process along, so there are no interruptions at all.

Automation is also one of the key things DevOps should think of and integrate. Some scripts automating manual key tasks would come in handy and reduce time in solving incidents that are crucial and with high priority.

In conclusion

In conclusion, I could say that DevOps is all about collaboration between different teams and removing barriers between the Developers (Devs) and Operations (Ops). DevOps is all about philosophy and strategy to eliminate the constraints between the Devs and Ops, so the business needs to adjust accordingly and the release goes on quicker on production.

Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams work together across the entire software application lifecycle, from development and test through deployment to operations.

All in all a DevOps Engineer has to manage the IT infrastructure as per the requirement of the supported services and software that is dedicated in a hybrid environment.

Stay positive and healthy all!