Reply to: DevOps

[SeanT]

No-ops / ****up as a service is five years away from being ready for anything. If you want to learn about DevOps, get to some meetups (they aren't all in London, and some are online - ooh, how modern!)

[KentDogWalker]

devops is dead, faas is the king

[stek]

It's Jumpstart/AI/NIM/xCAT with knobs on.

[rocktronAMP]

DevOps has now considered a "folklore" on to itself...

OP ... make sure that you are going genuinely into a "Developer / Operations" environment. I recommend reading up on the start of the movement. Go and look at the Netflix Open Source project blogs and their journey on moving from a Ruby monolith to a micro-services (another buzzwords*).

I would say that modern DevOps is a heavily Agile with a bias shift over to Kanban and traditional ticket based bugfix and user story / task development. Also contemporary DevOps team are supposed to have autonomy on their projects and milestones. Essentially, developers can no longer throw a piece code over the fence and say you, "Ops Team, deal with it. Deploy it. Install it. Configure it." Likewise operations can no longer assert ignorance when they did not know how to configure the software or execute tests against code: "It's not my problem, guv. Talk to the developer team on the second floor". DevOps means you sit together and additionally you sit with quality assurance people inside a team. If there is problem with your code in production, every one of you inside the devops team is liable and you will get SMS alert and/or a telephone call at 3 o'clock in the morning, if all goes ***s up. All of you in DevOps are accountable to the programme development manager or IT director. DevOps changes your outlook on how you build software, you will become more discipline and even cranky with individual who are not performing or collaborating, because you don't want that call late at night. That said, the quality of the software is supposed to be higher than the average, but who is measuring? The Achilles Heel for DeveOps is that the team can be quite insular, lack diversity and approachability and therefore hard for newcomers and therefore it becomes a silo of its own making. A bit like action man commandos every now and then need to be told to let off steam.

*Oh yes, did I mention cloud and distributed computing technology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps
DevOps at Netflix talks
https://martinfowler.com/bliki/DevOpsCulture.html
https://www.infoq.com/news/2015/03/gds-uk-gov-devops

[quackhandle]

Current client is doing this. What that means l haven't a scooby.

As long as l can still invoice l'm not much fussed.

qh

[Cirrus]

Horses for Courses

Anyone got any ideas what this means?

Like Agile it's a religion thing and people will burn each other over arcane definitions. Be prepared to get torn to pieces in an interview because you are Sunni and they are Shia.

For me it tends to imply continuous integration. That really also implies automated testing. Everybody's trying to do that and I've never seen anyone make notable progress.

DevOps is very trendy and will give you a much better chance of getting a job but I would suggest you stand a much higher chance of walking into a chaotic shambles.

[VillageContractor]

Read "The Phoenix Project" - its a novel based about IT and Devops. its actually quite a good read and less than a fiver on Kindle

Really good book - a nice way of explaining things.

Thanks JJG

[JoJoGabor]

Read "The Phoenix Project" - its a novel based about IT and Devops. its actually quite a good read and less than a fiver on Kindle

[m0n1k3r]

Hi,

A lot of roles advertised in my area (Agile) talk about DevOps model but I'm not sure whether they're using the wrong terminology or I'm missing something.

Anyone got any ideas what this means?

Thanks

VC

It is an operations (e.g. sysadmin, infrastructure etc) model that works in tandem with development, including often taking part in daily scrums, retrospectives etc, rather than being an entirely different function. Software development haven't delivered any value until the software is put in front of users, so there is a great deal of interest in having development and operations function as one.

DevOps is not a role (regardless of what recruiters make you think when they advertise for a 'senior DevOps'). it is a mindset, similar to but not the same as agile. Similar lines of thinking though, but from an ops rather than dev perspective.

In Lean terms, it is the integration of different parts of the value chain to consistently and with great quality deliver value to customers as quickly as possible. At least that's the aim, but old habits, turf thinking and "the way we've always done things around here" mentality usually puts great blockers in the way. It would be easy if it weren't for people.

[alloverit]

For it to be successful you definitely need mature automation. Can you really expect that under pressure dev to apply vuln patches to that internal cloud VM when they are under deadline pressure? For now my office is just aligning infrastructure resources to development pods until everything is self serve.

[sal]

DevOps (and this is from memory based on my understanding) is supposed to be a development team whose sole responsibility is unburdening the other dev teams from tasks that aren't directly related to achieving business value - in other words things like managing the CI pipeline, environment setup, source control infrastructure. The kind of thing that developers would otherwise have to fend for themselves with.

That said, current (large) client have a new DevOps team, and as far as I can tell, do none of these things. And no I don't know what they actually do.

This (the first part) is what is supposed be. As the traditional IT/Ops teams are often overburdened with processes/red tape they are to rigid to suit the "Agile development" needs of constant change and fiddling with stuff. A team of IT engineers who have significant knowledge in both fields can be very beneficial (and i have seen it in practice to a degree).

The problem is that in reality DevOps is misunderstood and poorly implemented. Often it boiling down to: We are already paying developers bundles of cash, they know computers, right? Let them manage their own infrastructure instead of paying extra cash for Ops guys. Needless to say the long term results are disastrous.

[billybiro]

DevOps (and this is from memory based on my understanding) is supposed to be a development team whose sole responsibility is unburdening the other dev teams from tasks that aren't directly related to achieving business value - in other words things like managing the CI pipeline, environment setup, source control infrastructure. The kind of thing that developers would otherwise have to fend for themselves with.

That said, current (large) client have a new DevOps team, and as far as I can tell, do none of these things. And no I don't know what they actually do.

DevOps == Cross-functional team == Wearing many hats == Jack of all trades, master of none == Cowboys.

[original PM]

DevOps (and this is from memory based on my understanding) is supposed to be a development team whose sole responsibility is unburdening the other dev teams from tasks that aren't directly related to achieving business value - in other words things like managing the CI pipeline, environment setup, source control infrastructure. The kind of thing that developers would otherwise have to fend for themselves with.

That said, current (large) client have a new DevOps team, and as far as I can tell, do none of these things. And no I don't know what they actually do.

That top bit seems to agree with the meaning we apply to the phrase.

At a very basic level it is the difference between a software developer - who just writes software for a user to use, and a 'techy' who manages and maintains the environments the software is developed in.

[Willapp]

DevOps (and this is from memory based on my understanding) is supposed to be a development team whose sole responsibility is unburdening the other dev teams from tasks that aren't directly related to achieving business value - in other words things like managing the CI pipeline, environment setup, source control infrastructure. The kind of thing that developers would otherwise have to fend for themselves with.

That said, current (large) client have a new DevOps team, and as far as I can tell, do none of these things. And no I don't know what they actually do.

[MyUserName]

Here DevOps are a team that people get seconded to if they want to and they have useful skills. They are responsible for automated build servers and other generic tools which are used across the various software teams.