In this post, I will share a brief history and the concept of DevOps, to help you get a better picture of what you can expect in a DevOps role. 

In my early days, I was part of the development team, and due to client requirements, my role changed to DevOps, a role that 3 years ago I didn’t know about it, so I decided to investigate and start learning about it.

How did teams be before DevOps? Let me tell you about it: 

In the beginning…

If you are a developer or have been following code development history, then you have seen tech companies in the early days, were usually their workforce was two teams that worked separately to see through the technical aspect of a project. These 2 teams were usually: 

The Development Team 

These people would usually consist of programmers, coders, software testers, and QA personnel who were responsible for building and implementing features specified by a project requirement. 

The Operations Administration Team 

This team would also usually consist of  network administrators, deployments, specialists, database administrators, and system administrators who were responsible for setting up servers, deploying environments, and taking the “finished code” from the dev team to production. 

The Dev and Ops relationship

There were a whole lot of cultural and knowledge boundaries between these 2 different teams which typically led to friction causing frustrations across the board and inefficiencies such as unstable and infrequent product deployments. 

So, what is DevOps? 

DevOps is a fusion of development and operations. It’s a combination of processes, philosophies, tools, and culture that gives a unit the ability to deliver products, applications, and services at incredibly high velocity. 

With this comes the possibility for a feature to move from being an idea to production in a matter of hours. DevOps gives organizations the ability to better thrive in the competitive and fast-paced world that we find ourselves in today.

In DevOps, the development and operations teams are no longer isolated from each other.

Components of DevOps 

The Amazon (AWS) team has an excellent list of the process which are considered pillars of a DevOps-first culture.

1. Continuous integration
   This enables your team to discover and fix bugs easier and faster through the aid of automatic builds and tests. 

2. Continuous delivery
   This enables your team to have a systematic process that allows deployments of application codes that have passed specific tests in an automated fashion. 

3. Microservices
   This is the philosophy of building software applications as a composition of independent service components that are loosely coupled where each component serves a well-defined purpose. 

4. Declarative infrastructure (Infrastructure as Code)
   This enables your team to avoid any form of manual server, database, and infrastructure provisioning. Instead, all forms of provisioning are done declaratively through code. Terraform is an awesome tool that serves this purpose 

5. Automated System Health Management
   This enables you to manage and monitor your infrastructure health in an automated fashion. 

6. Monitoring and logging
   We all know that logging and monitoring are critical to have high availability and performance. DevOps incorporates advanced monitoring processes. 

7. Agile communication
   Knowledge diffusion and circulation are critical in a DevOps culture, especially during the phase where you integrate the development & operations teams together. 

Where do I start? 

If you have made it to the end, and are already wanting to start your learning path as an Azure DevOps (or already have started), you may be asking yourself: Is there a place where I can learn/put my knowledge to good use? 

The answer is yes! It’s no surprise that I will say this, as I’ve been working at this company for 3+ years, so my recommendation is: Join us at Applaudo, we offer training for new developers, that are looking to get expertise; also, we offer job applications for seniors that have years of experience. Hope to see you joining our company. 

You can get more information about our Careers and Trainee Program here.

Final thoughts 

Thank you for reading my entry! I’m going to share with you some additional resources of information, that you can look at, from real companies that are currently winning with DevOps. Also, a detailed infographic of the History of DevOps, for more timeline details. 

“Practice the philosophy of continuous improvement. Get a little bit better every single day.” — Brian Tracy 

Resources

10 companies killing it at DevOps

About the author

Gabriel Garcia

Gabriel is an Azure DevOps and Data Engineer, with 3+ years of Azure Support and Operations, plus 6 months of experience with Scala.
He has worked in the retail industry, giving solutions regarding cost optimization, security compliance, CICD implementations, and P1 support with multiple teams, that has empowered his technical and soft skills to make clients comfortable and always coming back for more.