What you should know about DevOps

DevOps – fashionable and very useful thing in modern IT. It greatly accelerates the release of new versions of the software, raises its quality and reduces maintenance costs. However, all these advantages, of course, have their own price – DevOps should be allocated time and effort, as well as human and material resources. Let us understand how, where and why to implement DevOps practices in your high-tech business/IT division and what benefits it will bring.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a methodology, or rather a philosophy of web application development, which is based on a number of principles:

  • To release software and deliver it to the end user as quickly as possible. Gone are the days when development of new versions took months and years – now market leaders update their cloud services several thousand times a day. And new features are instantly available to users.
  • Automate everything. Testing, deployment, quality control, monitoring, operating system updates, backup – all this has to be done to keep the project alive. But not to do it with your own hands – all processes are templates, predictable and perfectly automated. For example, full automatic testing of a new version of the program on a working server takes only a few minutes. And along with the ease comes the speed of release: developers do not have to distract from unnecessary tasks, and everything happens by itself.
  • Combine development and operation. Software write programmers, testers, testers, operate admins, protect the security services. All these guys have completely different viewpoints on the product. If you combine all into one team, learn to communicate with each other and give the opportunity to work in one repository – the walls between closed professional groups will collapse. Specialists begin to share with each other problems and solutions. As a result, interesting techniques appear at the intersection of disciplines.
  • Document everything. Tests, infrastructure, configurations – all this must be documented and stored in one place and accessible to all. Such approach allows to avoid a situation in which sacral knowledge about algorithms and features of settings of servers live in heads of developers or are transferred on words and in chats. Each team member always has access to all knowledge of all team members.

What is worth knowing about DevOps-engineers:

  • What a DevOps-engineer does: he implements DevOps methodology in the company and automates the development process.
  • Companies that have implemented the DevOps methodology bring new products to the market faster, reduce costs and increase customer loyalty.
  • DevOps specialists have one of the highest salaries in the industry. 
  • DevOps-developers must understand the processes, know the programming language, understand the OS, cloud technologies, orchestration systems, CI/CD and be able to work with version control systems.

Allocate resources and time to implement DevOps and start moving through the steps from the simplest level. Going through all the steps gives you a system that seamlessly addresses your users’ needs, even under extreme conditions. Modern devops services are simplified every day – companies are actively creating off-the-shelf cloud tools and eliminating the hassle of setting up and integrating these tools into your code. Off-the-shelf analytics, monitoring, and failure detection systems are already available as APIs, pre-configured operating system images, and even as ready-to-use cloud servers with pre-configured pieces of infrastructure.

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