Prolegomena
Small companies very often ask themselves the question: is it necessary to implement the DevOps methodology, hire a DevOps engineer, or even create a whole DevOps department? Will the effort and investment paid off? After all, even just in one company, during the development of a product, technologies will certainly change and requirements will change. Today, for example, the company is engaged in virtualization, tomorrow will be the time for containerization, etc. Startups like these lead to infrastructure expansion or even upgrades, as well as the need for highly skilled DevOps specialists who must not only have a wide range of knowledge, but also must have quite a lot of experience in applying the DevOps culture. Obviously, this may require quite serious financial investments, which not every company can master. In this case, the ability to use an acceptable provider of the devops as a service will allow any company to avoid resource bottlenecks and still achieve its goals.
A little bit about DevOps culture
Despite the fact that our topic now concerns the DevOps methodology, as a service provided by the outsourcer, it will not be superfluous to recall what we mean by the DevOps culture. The main indicator of the DevOps culture is that it is built on the automation of all processes of the software development life cycle. Specifically, automation is expressed in the following stages of the process:
1. Automation of testing;
2. Automation of deployment of various infrastructures, both locally in the data centers of hosting providers, and in cloud services;
3. Automation of services;
4. Automation and management of server configurations;
5. Work on containerization
The work of DevOps engineers is carried out in three functional environments. This:
– environment for developers,
– environment for testing (everything that testers need to test each stage of the product, create automated tests and automatically run them),
– production environment (environment where this product will be placed and will work).
From what has been said above, it becomes clear that the DevOps culture, its approaches and practices are most often applicable in large organizations. This is usually done at the corporate level, when the volume of production is huge, when many parallel processes are working, when the company has several software products or even platforms that consist of a huge number of micro services and additional dependencies. After all, in general, the development process itself is overgrown with a huge number of tools and platforms on which this development is carried out.
A little bit about DevOps engineers
In any product company, always worked system administrators who configured servers, deployed various services on these servers, loaded applications there and made them work. Also, these specialists set up the network infrastructure.
Their fellow developers, in turn, have always been interested in releasing new versions and updates as quickly as possible, releasing products and not worrying too much about everything else. Therefore, there was a high level of inconsistency between developers and system administrators. It was at the junction of such processes that DevOps arose. Its goal was to build software life cycle processes in such a way as to take into account the interests of both developers and system administrators.
In essence, a DevOps engineer is a kind of evolution of a system administrator. System administration is the base on which the DevOps profile is built. However, can we say that a system administrator can immediately perform the functions of DevOps? No, because knowledge of the tools that DevOps works on and the corresponding experience is a kind of complementary add-on to system administration. DevOps engineers are those engineers who are focused on automation. If a system administrator can manually configure one server, then DevOps’ task is to configure several servers at once and automatically deploy them in the clouds.
Can a developer, by default, be a DevOps engineer? Of course not, because DevOps engineers don’t write software product code. Their programming skills are skills that deal with automation in programming, in testing, in infrastructure deployment. DevOps engineers don’t have to have all the knowledge that goes into development. They need to know and understand the software life cycle and how the tools developers use work. And yet, when developers work for a long time where DevOps is implemented, they gain certain knowledge and experience in DevOps and, if desired, they can continue their professional growth in this direction.
