DevOps?

DevOps is one of those tech words that is in mouth of everyone in any IT workplace. In this post I will try to paraphrase about DevOps and what is its function in the IT environment.

Apparently DevOps is a term that bears no canonical definition, this means that the definition of DevOps can change from one company to another. I am not ashamed to tell you that my personal favorite general definition of the term was the one I found on Wikipedia and it goes as it follows:

  "... DevOps is the immediate response to the interdependence of software development and IT operaions...".

 So based on this definition, we can picture a DevOps employee as a person whose duty is to facilitate the life of a developer by helping out with nuisances such as putting up and maintaining the server in which an application is going to run. Even though this is a good brief definition there is much more to it. For showing this, I'm bringing up Atlassian's definition of the term: 

"DevOps is a set of practices that automate processes between software development teams and IT teams, so that it is easier to compile, test and publish software quickly."

This definition seems to take a fair amount of disciplines and work on the part in which they connect in the process of software development. And yes DevOps people require to be fond of a wide skillset, but they also require to adopt a different mindset towards collaboration.  Some authors cite that the implementation of DevOps most of the time requires an internal cultural shift.In order to understand this it is necesary to look back to 2008, the time around DevOps started to come out. At the time a developer was completely responsible for writing code exactly the way IT operations asked them to. This of course made both of these departments to have different goals which usually caused a conflict among them. DevOps aims to blend them into a collaborative team that is able to understand the needs of each department and the enhancement of each. 

For the particular set of exercises assigned in class,  I believe there is a greater focus towards the job of a system administrator  rather than the DevOps practices as a whole. For that we would need a team of developers and a team of system administrator, testers, database administrators, etc.  In order to focus towards DevOps.