DevOps: What was that again?
Ok, so I get it! You have already heard this term a zillion times. Gosh! Aren’t we good with acronyms (well look at SAFe)? But when I first heard this term & promptly went Googl-ing around it, I was quite surprised – as there wasn’t much of “surprising stuff” in it frankly. Hmnn! What am I saying here?
Well, if we dig deep in to this concept of DevOps – do we really see something extra ordinary? Nah! Unfortunately, even Agile family itself is formed with many frameworks – which are loosely coupled – allowing us enough breathing room to play around with it. But when we started playing with the frameworks, more often we ended up letting the good practices (mostly engineering practices) fall through the crack. Making sense? Let me elaborate.
Assume, 15 years back – we were doing a well-planned traditional project. If you were managing the show (let’s assume you were the PM) – won’t you be having plans in place for the release management? Under most likelihood – you would definitely have it chalked out and there you would be having all the bells and whistles of Release Management world in place to ensure a smooth flow! If you did – great! You are in the flow!
Duh! Then what the h*** is DevOps? Ok – this term – DevOps was popularized through a series of "DevOps Days" starting in 2009 in Belgium (& then in India)*. So, a practice – which was there from ages, lost the glory somehow in between – was brought back to light by group of people – who probably realized that we were on many instances deviating from the common rules of software development. And as we are typically attracted by the “new” stuffs around us – this gained popularity quite fast. Well of course with ever changing technology trends, DevOps had its focus on bridging the growing distance between development and build/release teams. And it also started leveraging the technology support of Cloud (e.g. Canopy) and VM.
So here we stand - with DevOps - doing the TEAM work that we used to do once, but today it's powered with current stack of smart tools/platforms to support the overall process. So, weather it's just CI/CD or Automation or perhaps containerization - it's a world of DevOps, a world - where Software Development happens as a TEAM - nothing to separate them out in silos.
Cheers!!!
*Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps
I had a very narrow view of Dev Ops , but have learned a bit in the last year.
I resonate your thoughts - DevOps is a culture thing. Had once written about it - https://medium.com/@shamasis/things-i-learned-while-streamlining-engineering-at-fusioncharts-part-1-5e10817958b There is a paradox with identifying DevOps as an entity in an organisation that has good and favourable operations. The better it is adopted, the more invisible it becomes.