As a frequent networker, I often explain to people what DevOps is and what I do. DevOps, like so many things, is easy if you know it, but if you don’t, it goes right over your head. As such, I put together this article to explain what the DevOps movement means to me and why I believe businesses and individuals should take care to know and understand it.

What is DevOps? According to The Agile Admin, “DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support.”

• At the highest level, DevOps is about getting people to work together effectively and in turn be happy and successful. It is about building communities of system engineers who all bring their knowledge and experience to focus on accomplishing a common goal.
• DevOps specialists converge processes together to create a flow from business requirements, to development, to software, which then leads to operations, resulting in a service to customers. Throughout the lifecycle of DevOps, it is up to the customer to provide relevant feedback which will both create and refine business requirements. This is the DevOps flow.
• Lastly, and what most people think of, DevOps is the creation and exploitation of tools to facilitate collaboration, increase effectiveness of software deployments, improve quality, and lower costs. Perform all these correctly and you will be in a great position to increase profits.

Where Did DevOps Come From?

DevOps started off as Agile Operations, but system engineers quickly realized that Agile development does not address the four different types of work that system engineers must handle on a day-to-day basis.

1. Project management – DDTICS (Discovery → Development → Testing → Implementation → Clean up → Support → Repeat)
2. Internal projects (Building tools that improve the processes)
3. Planned IT services – (Ticketing system )
4. Emergency work – (Fire fighting and disaster recovery)

Communities of engineers had been collaborating together to build suites of tools and processes to follow. We needed our own methods, process, and tools to help people collaborate, remove constraints, and build flow. The development of these processes and tools was the beginning of the DevOps movement.

The Future of DevOps

With the explosion of cloud services and virtualization, the idea of owning and operating individual servers is quickly becoming obsolete. No longer will companies employ large numbers of systems engineers to support their own servers. They will be using cloud services that are designed and operated by DevOps teams. Service providers will deliver services to companies who will operate their businesses on hosted solutions. Companies will have many virtual servers to run their processes and DevOps teams will continue to push out updated systems and processes. I believe this will improve the services that businesses use to deliver products and services to their customers.

I’m very excited about the future. As a DevOps professional, I’ll be looking for constraints to identify, processes to improve, and new tools to exploit.