DevOps Simplified

We are enterprise tech service company and during our journey it happen many a times that we come across people inquiring about “What is DevOps”. 

Information Technology is such an sector that has constantly kept evolving and this makes it hard to keep track evaluation that occurs if you are new or are not in close touch with the market trends. This is more like an experience you gain constructing your house before twenty years and trying to apply same understanding in recent times – result you will probably feel lost in some cases.

DevOps as a terminology

It is a trend that has been recently acquired by companies in response to serve the unpredictable service & product industry demands. For most of companies out there it’s just another marketing key-word but for some this is a way of being and an answer to their hunger to deliver better output.

Why DevOps?

The answer to this question is in the way IT industry operates. Companies in order to deliver a said service or product spends lot of resources, time, efforts and money, however in the end the ratio of satisfied clients only depends on how synchronously did each individual team in a company worked. Ideally there are many factors that influence how well an organizations team works. Things like constantly increasing projects, improper channel of data & expected workflow, constantly evolving business needs & the efforts between dealing with old, new and changed codes makes it tough for developers to keep track of work and still maintain same efficiency. If somehow developer manages the work, the other half i.e. deployment activities like managing production environment, actual deployment, deployment cycles, performance measuring are highly dependent on ability of infrastructure resources.

This usually is a chaos in real world, resulting in lack of trust, blame games & misunderstanding.

DevOps is an answer 

Answer to all this imbalance. 

“DevOps in my opinion is a way of being or perhaps an attitude an organization carries as a part of commitment to deliver a good product to the consumer.”

DevOps emphasis on a tight coupling of Developer Engineers & Operations Engineers creating a collaborative environment that facilitates high productivity & better delivery with use of automated tools, automated workflows & automated testing.

However just owning few tools does not make DevOps a reality, it has a lot to do with the mind set of the team too. With so much happening around teams have get used to their own developing methodologies and deployment strategies which often over look the industry best practices. If an organization really wants to follow DevOps there is a lot to do with the mind set of teams.

Using tools like 

- Jenkins that helps to Automate Tests

- GitHub for source control that helps to track all changes in application & its configuration code 

- Chef, Puppet & SaltStack can be used for configuration management

Can only help in deploying & automating the process, however the primitive ways of writing long chunk of codes and long deployment cycles needs to be shorten. Dev & Ops team needs to work more cohesively to work efficiently, be more responsive to fast pacing business needs & better collaboration.

In order to know if the organization you are going to get associated religiously follow DevOps or just using it as another marketing strategy, try getting idea about their development methodologies, tools they use or their ideal iteration cycle, this will give you good sense about their actual capability and help you rely on someone who care about your product and their services.

Feel free to reach this folks in case if you are willing to engage with a team who understands DevOps in its true sense. 

Author: Sangeeta Patel

A Strategist, Navigator and Director of this high-end IT solutions company. Sangeeta has led many tech projects in her career and have been exceptional leader. Her attitude towards work sets her apart in the league. She is a tech enthusiast, mother & wife.