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  • Defining the Dev and the Ops in Devops

    Defining the Dev and the Ops in Devops

    This is a guest post by Matt Watson from Stackify

    So what does DevOps mean exactly? What is the Dev and what is the Ops in DevOps? The role of Operations can mean a lot of things and even different things to different people. DevOps is becoming more and more popular but a lot of people are confused on the topic of who does what. So let’s make a list of the responsibilities operations traditionally has and then figure out what developers should be doing, and which if any responsibilities should be shared.

    Operations responsibilities

    • IT buying
    • Installation of server hardware and OS
    • Configuration of servers, networks, storage, etc…
    • Monitoring of servers
    • Respond to outages
    • IT security
    • Managing phone systems, network
    • Change control
    • Backup and disaster recovery planning
    • Manage active directory
    • Asset tracking

    Shared Development & Operations duties

    • Software deployments
    • Application support

    Some of these traditional responsibilities have changed in the last few years. Virtualization and the cloud have greatly simplified buying decisions, installation, and configuration. For example, nobody cares what kind of server we are going to buy anymore for a specific application or project. We buy great big ones, virtualize them, and just carve out what we need and change it on the fly. Cloud hosting simplifies this even more by eliminating the need to buy servers at all.

    So what part of the “Ops” duties should developers be responsible for?

    • Be involved in selecting the application stack
    • Configure and deploy virtual or cloud servers (potentially)
    • Deploy their applications
    • Monitor application and system health
    • Respond to applications problems as they arise.

    Developers who take ownership of these responsibilities can ultimately deploy and support their applications more rapidly. DevOps processes and tools eliminate the walls between the teams and enables more agility for the business. This philosophy can enable the developers to potentially be responsible for the enter application stack from OS level and up in more a self service mode.

    So what does the operations team do then?

    • Manage the hardware infrastructure
    • Configure and monitor networking
    • Enforce policies around backup, DR, security, compliance, change control, etc
    • Assist in monitoring the systems
    • Manage active directory
    • Asset tracking
    • Other non production application related tasks

    Depending on the company size the workload of these tasks will vary greatly. In large enterprise companies these operations tasks become complex enough to require specialization and dedicated personnel for these responsibilities. For small to midsize companies the IT manager and 1-2 system administrators can typically handle these tasks.

    DevOps is evolving into letting the operations team focus on the infrastructure and IT policies while empowering the developers to exercise tremendous ownership from the OS level and up. With a solid infrastructure developers can own the application stack, build it, deploy it, and cover much if not all of its support. This enables development teams to be more self-service and independent of a busy centralized operations team. DevOps enables more agility, better efficiency, and ultimately a higher level of service to their customers.

    mat

    About the author: Matt Watson is the Founder & CEO of Stackify. He has a lot of experience managing high growth and complex technology projects. He is focused on changing the way developers support their production applications with DevOps.

  • The Crowdsourcing of Code: What IT Can Learn from Developers

    The Crowdsourcing of Code: What IT Can Learn from Developers

    This is a guest post by Yoav Landman (@yoavlandman), Founder & Chief Technology Officer at JFrog

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    The agile movement is influencing the adoption of new methods of collaboration from developer to consumer throughout the development process. The sharing of resources across companies, communities or even countries is known as crowdsourcing and it is becoming increasingly common. After all, when it comes to coding most of us speak much the same language. The idea of collaboration isn’t exclusive to developers and can also provide benefits to the IT fields. In IT, community knowledge is becoming a huge asset.

    Developers and IT professionals often turn to networks outside of their own for information about the artifacts they use. Through the sharing of successes, failures, feedback and updates, the building blocks that make up software are (virtually) crowdsourced. With crowdsourcing becoming the new norm, there’s no shortage of best practices to take away from their community.

    With that, let’s explore the practices that’ll make for a crowdsourcing strategy that’s beneficial, efficient and safe for software developers and IT alike:

    License Control

    When you use a communal tool, such as open source, you must protect your project through licensing. Nothing puts a damper on a project more than a licensing issue—monetary fees, wasted productivity hours and vendor lock-in can become a huge liability. More so than ever, responsibility for larger business initiatives is falling in IT’s lap, and a large portion of honing the role comes from licensing control.

    Bring It In-House

    Ensure that your original project is stored in-house. The main reason: it guarantees you’re in control and can reliably control accessibility to others within your organization for download. It also doesn’t put you at the mercy of the availability of external software repositories. Be sure to equip your project with internal backup – and keep it up to date.

    Access Control and Internal Audit

    While sharing is encouraged, be sure to filter who and what’s accessing and updating your organization’s resources. Who and what is allowed on the network? Ensure there are policies and procedures in place. Without proper management, you have no record of the where code or software is coming from or going to which can jeopardize both quality and security.

    Free Up Resources: Share Centrally & Adopt Tools that Enable Management

    An internal centralized resource for developers to share and pull libraries is a best practice. Not all methods are created equally though and careful tool selection can increase productivity and free up your team’s resources .

    For example, using a version control system to store libraries can actually slow down the development process—they lack searchability, proxy facilities and a certain level of permission management. These manage source code (i.e. instructions, text) not binary files (i.e. builds, executable form) and drain storage space and network resources (when using a distributed version control). Pick the right tool for the job.

    Automated Clean-Up  

    Combining socialization with automation will increase productivity. As creatures of habit, so many IT pros use manual intervention in processes that can be made automatic. One example from the software development side is clean-up. Let’s say you’re using a continuous integration server. Binaries are constantly being built; it may build 50 versions of the library in one hour but your team only qualifies one version. Adopting proper tools to eliminate parts of the cycle that don’t require manual intervention will increase productivity.

    Crowdsourcing has swept professional networks, but most industries are still limited to internal interaction among co-workers.  Software developers and IT professionals are unique in that we converse across companies and even industries on a global scale. With the right tools, we can share consumer feedback and understand risks, successes, and code that form the building blocks for great systems. While it is not yet a standard practice for fields such as marketing or law, crowdsourcing is beneficial for so many fields in IT here and now.