Experts Talk

  1. What does it mean to be a DevOps?

    There are so many different interpretations possible for the term Devops; it's automated infrastructure, it's agile infrastructure, it's bridging the gap between devs and ops , it's agile system administration, it's a movement, it's a mindset.

    Joe Thompson said that DevOps "really [can't] be reduced to a single role. If anything, it's more about the makeup of teams than individual roles. If you're doing DevOps, you regularly have Devs, Admins, DBAs, Storage, etc. all in the same room working on the same thing. You can't really abstract that interaction into a separate role."

  2. How did being a DevOps become so popular?

    DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.

    The DevOps model means Infrastructure as Code, Microservices, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration, Configuration Management, Monitoring and Logging, Communication and Collaboration which in the end enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.

  3. What are the major challenges?

    The main challenge is the core reason for DevOps in first place: the central idea is to break down the walls between the development and operations teams so that they can work together to generate a superior result in less time than before. Communication is the key, and in order to get the best end result, it is important to have the best communication across all the teams involved.

  4. What does a day in the life of a DevOps expert look like?

    DevOps activities:

    1. Make sure that the pipeline is running smoothly- This is one of the most important tasks of a DevOps engineer to make sure that CI/CD pipeline is intact and fixing any issue or failure with it is the #1 priority for the day. They often need to spend time on troubleshooting, analysing and providing fixes to issues.

    2. Interaction with other teams- Co-ordination and collaboration is the key for DevOps to be successful and hence daily integration with the Dev and QA team, Program management and IT is always required.

    3. Work on Automation Backlog - Automation is the soul of DevOps, so DevOps engineers spend lots of time behind the keyboard planning and automating stuff on a daily basis.

    4. Infrastructure Management - DevOps engineers are also responsible for maintaining and managing the infrastructure required for CI/CD pipeline and making sure that its up and running and being used optimally is also part of their daily schedule. Ex. Working on Backup, High Availability, New Platform setup etc.

    5. Exploration - DevOps leverage a lot from the various tools which are available. There are many open source options so the team need to regularly check on this and adopt different solutions as required. This is something which also requires some effort, but not on daily basis. Ex. What are open source options available to keep the cost at minimum?

    6. Removing bottleneck - DevOps primary purpose is to identify the bottlenecks / Manual handshakes and work with everyone involved (Dev / QA and all other stakeholders) to remove them so the team spend a good amount of time in finding such things and build the Automation Backlog using this. Ex. How can we build it faster?

    7. Documentation - Though Agile / DevOps stresses less on the documentation, it is still an important part of the job which a DevOps engineer does on a daily basis, Be it Server Information, Daily Week charted, Scrum / Kanban board or Simple steps to configure / backup or modify the infrastructure, you need to spend a good amount of time in coming up with these artifacts.

    8. Training and Self Development - Self learning and Training is very useful in gaining a better understanding and many organizations encourage their employees to take the time out and improve their skills and the same holds true for DevOps folks as well- So learn something new every day...

    9. Continuous Improvement as Practice - Last but not least, it’s up to the DevOps folks to build awareness on the potential of CI/CD and DevOps practices and build a culture of leveraging it for doing things better, reducing re-work, increasing the productivity and optimizing the use of existing resources. Go and talk to people to build the DevOps and Continuous Improvement culture...

  5. How can I become a DevOps engineer?

    There is no specific educational or career track for becoming a DevOps engineer. Many DevOps engineers are either developers who take an interest in deployment and network operations, or system administrators who maneuver into the development side of the process. They are individuals who have pushed beyond their defined roles and competences to gain an all-inclusive view of their technical environments.

    While it’s great to beef up your coding skills and get familiar with automation tools, you’ll also want to seek out projects and new roles that allow you to exercise the “soft” skills that are at the core of DevOps. Find opportunities to collaborate within and outside of your team. Help your company move to a faster test and deployment rhythm. Be open to listening to others’ ideas. Keep in mind that DevOps is less about doing things a particular way, and more about moving the business forward and giving it a stronger technological advantage.