Thoughts on DevOps
DevOps has evolved over several years and now it has some esoteric definition like “a cross-disciplinary community of practice dedicated to the study of building, evolving and operating rapidly-changing resilient systems at scale.” to banal "software engineering practice that aims at unifying software development (Dev) and software operation (Ops)". In my simplistic view DevOps is the practice of moving a piece of function/feature from design thru development to an operational entity.
My previous thought was on Agile which focused on making development faster. DevOps takes it to next level of moving that function/feature to an operational entity. Like taking a finished product to a customer in the most efficient way. Most of us who don't work in companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook etc don't see the code being deployed every minute because we are not mature enough in our process. I think the reason some of us can't deploy code at that speed is our own arcane process of "check points or gates". There is a modern example of this in real life. Think of 4 way STOP signs, it works great everyone takes their turn in sequence. Then came Round About which dictated everyone to move when they are ready. Some of us dreaded to do it the first time but once you are used to it then no going back. Round Abouts are actually twice as efficient as STOP signs. Figure out how you can go from STOP signs to Round About. Most projects don't need code to be deployed to production every minute but moving it to a test/QA region is always great.
A good DevOps is not a substitute for a good Agile thinking. First comes building a great product fast and without bugs then comes the DevOps, otherwise it will be garbage in garbage out in speed. The catch is, if companies are good at Agile they need a good DevOps to take it to production, so companies need to be good at both, at the same time.
We live in a fast moving world, create product fast (Agile) and move them to the destination faster (DevOps). What next Robots doing the work??......
