DevOps: Fundamental Questions
“DevOps is not a thing. It is a set of problem statements and solution possibilities that are always growing.”
-Damon Edwards, host of DevOps Cafe
Sysadmin, ad hoc security technician, build reverter, deployment curator, disaster recovery specialist: these are the terms I would use to describe my past coworkers who had the job title “DevOps”.
After recording several interviews, my impression is that to ascribe someone the title of “DevOps” is to miss the point.
Depending on who you ask, DevOps is
- the agile manifesto applied to sysadmin
- the applied version of The Lean Enterprise
- the guys who manage Jenkins and containers
- a measure of how much empathy you have for developers if you are an ops person, or how much empathy you have for ops if you are a developer
From 8/25 – 8/30, Software Engineering Daily will demystify DevOps.
The following questions are at the top of my mind.
- Does the DevOps role actually exist?
- What does it mean for a company to “implement DevOps” where it previously did not have DevOps in its vocabulary?
- If an organization adopts DevOps, what does that mean for software engineers?
- What are “immutable infrastructure” and “infrastructure as code”?
- What precipitated the movement from service-oriented architecture to microservices?
- Why are containers so important to DevOps?
- Why is Docker so important to containers?
- Does DevOps have an application to Docker’s use on a Spark/MapReduce analytics platform?
