DevOps: After all, what is it?

I confess that I was very curious in the first time I heard this word. The worst part is that I was without internet access to contact my guru “Google’s Father.” I thought, what is this DevOps? Religion? Video Game? An Ice Cream Brand?

Of course none of above because I was in a place where people were talking about information technology and infrastructure. Searching, I began to understand what about it was.

In 2008, in an event about Agile, one of the lists addressed the theme “Agile Methodology for Infrastructure Administration”, inspired by the agile model of software development.

The term DevOps was presented, then in 2009, during the Velocity conference by O’Reilly, John Allspaw and Paul Hammond where they show the work “10 + Deploys Per Day and Ops Cooperation at Flickr.”

From then on, Patrick Debois, a great enthusiastic of the subject had the idea of creating a meeting called DevOpsDay, which occurred in the same year in Ghent, Belgium.

After all, what is DevOps?

It is the alignment of the entire development team with the operation personnel, so that together, the two teams accelerate the deliveries with better quality through previously defined tools and responsibilities.

Circulos: 

• Development (Software Engineering)
• Quality Assurance (QA)
• Operations (Infrastructure)

The proposal is to use a culture of collaboration (everyone helping each other) and contributing to achieve success. In this way, this cultural model becomes responsible for approaching system development practices with deployment tests, with performance, giving the assurance that nothing goes wrong when delivering the application, product or customers service.

Patrick Debois (who coined the term) says that DevOps has its base, essentially built on four axes:

? Culture / Collaboration

? End of the divisions

? Healthy relationship between areas

? Behavior change

? Automation / Deploy

? Control

? Monitoring

? Configuration Management

? Orchestration

? Metric Evaluations

? Measurements

? Performance

? Logs and integration

? Sharing / The Feedback is everything

? Good communication between the team

The main benefits:

For the way projects are conducted in companies, the DevOps brings time-optimizing benefits and efforts by proposing smaller development cycles, collaborative work and breaking paradigms between the involved areas. In addition, it always aims to generate revenue and no costs.

Integration and reduction of time in projects:

Working with DevOps also brings advantages such as the integration with trends like Cloud (including hybrid clouds), PaaS, SaaS and IaaS, which together decrease operational costs considerably and make it much easier for the company’s routine. Thus, it will have sharing tools and broader engagement. In addition to infrastructure and highly competent work platforms that have the support of companies specialized in providing the service. This helps the migration of culture and adaptation to a more productive model and occurs with less difficulty.

Process and resource optimization

Redesigning the shape of the work of the sectors involved also brings benefits in terms of software reuse, reduction in delivery efforts and flexibility to have faster responses, even assisting to reduce rates of misfits by dividing projects into stages and testing the functionalities in an intermediate way. With the help of the automation tools and uncomplicated dashboards, it also tracks more easily the metrics and the results of this deployment, performs automatic deploys or easier, unleashes teamwork and helps them “to have less mistakes” and have smoother communication. In addition, it optimizes people and resources, making the company to operate differently, eventually using the same people and equipment, which gives it an advantage.

Greater capacity

With conducting training by specialized consultants, the company is still able to qualify and prepare its teams better. It can raise the quality of the collaborative work and help teams to be more receptive to cultural change and see value in this measure.

Facility in proactive intervention

With the DevOps culture, there is integration of groups and ease in adapting a problem found during the project to the best solution. Since the tests and intermediate deliveries can already detect potential failures or needs of adequacy. All this helps the company to meet processes and demands with greater excellence, supported by the use of automation tools and results. In the end, always focusing on a promising cultural change closely monitored by specialists and able to transform positively the way the company does business. I believe that this article gave a basic idea of what the theme means, it is going to help in short step to research, and it will allow those who can contribute to a better understanding.

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Marco Antonio da Silva

Agile Transformation Coach | Speaker | Volunteer