DevOps
DevOps (Development + Operations) is one of most popular terms in the IT world recently. From what I’ve read and listened to so far, my understanding is it is all about continuous deployment (or delivery). Basically, you have to automate everything from development to deployment to practice DevOps.
Current problem
Traditionally, successful deployment is a huge challenge. It is mostly a manual and cumbersome process. Because of its sensitive nature the system admins are not huge fans of deployments. Also, another challenge is the miscommunication (or no communication in some cases) between system admin and development teams. They are generally run by different high-level executives and their priorities conflict most of the time.
Solution
On the philosophical side, DevOps is bringing these teams together and work in harmony. Having social events with both teams’ attendance is a key to build confidence among team members. As Richard Campbell (from RunAsRadio and .NET Rocks podcasts) says “Pizza and beer is a global lubricant”.
Dev…
On the development side, the key requirement is continuous integration. You have to able to run unit tests and acceptance tests automatically on build servers. This means development has to be done in short sprints in an agile way with frequent check-ins. One step further of this stage is continuous deployment.
…Ops
This is where the IT team comes into play. When the whole system is automated, deploying to production frequently and without much headache becomes possible. Cloud computing is one of the core technologies that makes DevOps possible. Ability to manage virtual machines programmatically (i.e. AWS, OpenStack) leads to a whole bunch of possibilities.
This is a fairly complex topic encompassing many disciplines and technologies. Also it’s quite dynamic and open to innovation. Definitely worth keeping an eye on.
