What is DevOps?

DevOps: Some people dismiss it as hype or as the sysadmin role under a new name, while others see it as just another skill you pick up from a course or a degree. It is none of these. In my view, it is a blend of skills: some come from school, some from formal training, and the rest from hands-on work day to day.

• A “classical” SysAdmin generally doesn’t rely on sophisticated automation tools. The typical routine means moving from one node to the next, applying configurations, installing software, and repairing whatever is broken.
• A standard SysAdmin role usually involves no real programming beyond small scripts that run on individual nodes.
• A “classical” SysAdmin typically works with physical machines, and much of the day goes to storage problems (rebuilding file systems, restoring from backups), tracking down hardware incompatibilities, and applying patches.

The current industry trend is to describe infrastructure as Code. Today you can create whole environments (for example on AWS), complete with correctly sized hardware and pre-installed services, using nothing but Code. Automation tools like Ansible or Chef make all this possible. It takes more than basic scripting, though it doesn’t call for complex algorithms either.

As noted above, DevOps is defined by Automation, since working with nodes is no longer almost entirely manual. Commands now run against many nodes simultaneously, and automated monitoring tools raise alerts and sometimes trigger corrective actions, such as scaling resources or adding new nodes to a cluster.

In my opinion, any organization running a computing environment so large that scaling it through classical SysAdmin work is no longer practical or cost-effective. The same goes for any organization planning to move its infrastructure to the Cloud. Because this is a relatively new position that doesn’t fit neatly alongside Devs, SysAdmins or QAs, it can be hard to define job requirements, map out a career path, or even settle on compensation, but that is beginning to change.

That was my introduction to the DevOps concept. Thanks for reading!