What is DevOps?
DevOps is a portmanteau of the words: Developers and Operations. It primarily refers to practices employed in the software development process which enhance collaboration and communication and automated software delivery process. The stages of development, testing and deployment occur frequently and reliably in this process. The main purpose of DevOps or this framework is to make the working of the development and operations team cohesive and smooth by increasing knowledge sharing.
The principles of DevOps
DevOps is considered as a skill-set, a role in SDLC, a framework for development and operations or as a job description. There are many conflicting definitions of DevOps and all should be united to understand the bigger role DevOps plays for an organization. Once the DevOps environment is established properly, it could lead to a lot of growth opportunity for the organizations.
The best practices of DevOps include:
- Seamless integration of the changes.
- The agile methodology should be used by the team to use tools as per the demand of the project.
- Transparency between the different teams
- Flexible approach to ensure the teams adapt to changes or any exceptional circumstances.
- Open culture in the organization with a focus on teamwork, collaboration, and good communication.
- The automation of software should be carried out in stages :
- Continuous Integration: The code is integrated with a larger piece of code and tested.
- Continuous Delivery: The development team works in sprints and churns out an incremental release.
- Continuous Deployment: If the code passes all the phases of testing, it is deployed to production
- Continuous Monitoring: The application is monitored for any bugs or defects and the issues are resolved.
What is a DevOps Engineer?
“A DevOps engineer is an information technology (IT) professional who works with software developers, system operators (SysOps) and other production IT staff to oversee code releases.”
In short, a DevOps engineer can be a developer who can think with an Operations mindset and has the following skillset:
- Familiarity and experience with both Ops and Automation tools
- The ability to design, build, and operate a technology stack.
- Configuration and automation management, health checks, single point of failure, notifications.
- Expert skill in any of the following tools and coding languages (will vary depending on job): Docker, Jenkins, Chef, Puppet, Salt, Git, MongoDB (or other NoSQL DB), JAVA, and Nginx.
- Strong operational experience in Linux/Unix environment and scripting languages: Shell, Perl, Python.
- Ensuring operational best practices by working closely with the deployment/releasing teams.
- Experience with AWS in a production environment: EC2, S3, VPC, IAM, ELB, CloudWatch
- Comfortable with dealing with frequent testing and incremental releases
- Understanding of Ops challenges and how they can be addressed during design and development
- Effective soft skills for better collaboration across the team,
So, do you have the critical skills every DevOps needs to succeed?
