Ever since the 2008 discussion between Andrew Clay and Patrick Debois which bothered on the drawbacks of Agile, the word DevOps has slowly started to gain traction so much so that it became a thing right after the 2009 DevOpsDays event held in Belgium.
Let us now consider a few things surrounding DevOps Engineering.
What is DevOps?
While there is not yet a generally accepted definition for the term, one of the most popular definitions at the moment, and especially in the academic world is one from the trio of Len Bass, Ingo Weber, and Liming Zhu which defines it as “a set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production, while ensuring high quality”
To make things easier though, I would like to say that DevOps provides a holistic approach that bridges the gap between software engineering and software operations.
While this can sound or look simple to the ears, the actual process needs a massive amount of experience both on the job and in terms of an understanding of how various parts of the puzzle actually interact.
Who is a DevOps Engineer?
A DevOps Engineer is in plain terms, a Site Reliability Engineer. The term site reliability engineer was first used by Google and this role still forms the backbone of ensuring that infrastructure and software in the Google ecosystem are secure, scalable, and provisioned to meet not just the end users but the complete production cycle.
A DevOps Engineer is therefore responsible for the security, and scalability of infrastructure and code from concept to delivery.
If you actually want to dive in deep to understand what site reliability engineers do at Google, you can check out this book.
What is DevOps Engineering?
Now that we have gone through the proper route of understanding DevOps and who a DevOps Engineer is, we can not go ahead to answer the question, What is DevOps Engineering?
At this point, it is safe to define DevOps Engineering as the process of planning and implementing systems and automation that ensure the security and scalability of infrastructure and code from concept to delivery.
This then means that DevOps Engineering tries to unite the process between building, testing, and maintenance of infrastructure as well as the development and release of code such that businesses and organizations are able to follow the fastest possible route to feature releases without sacrificing integrity or function.
I believe that at this point you might now be asking Why Do I need a DevOps Engineer? If this post hasn’t yet answered that question for you, then it’s time to read up on this post that gives more insight into the question.
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