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Tag: DevOps roles

  • DevOps Is Not a Role — It’s a Culture

    DevOps Is Not a Role — It’s a Culture

    The full-stack developer is becoming increasingly rare these days. Due to the accelerating complexity of modern software development, programmers often specialize in specific languages, frameworks or levels of the software stack, such as frontend or backend.

    These same fractures seem to be occurring within DevOps, too. Nowadays, large companies no longer have one strain of DevOps—there are often many flavors of rapid deployment and various DevOps toolchains used across an organization’s development teams. DevOps now requires specific training in the nuances of each cloud service provider’s platforms, too, requiring specialists trained on individual cloud platforms, like AWS, Azure or GCP. The role is expanding and taking on new forms, with platform engineering and site reliability engineering coming of age.

    Therefore, companies should be viewing DevOps not so much as one specific role or a set of tools, but as a culture. I recently met with Sashank Purighalla, CEO and founder of BOS Framework, to gather insights into the evolving role and culture of DevOps. According to Purighalla, “DevOps is a combination of culture, practices, processes and tools.” Below, we’ll identify the challenges that come with introducing DevOps and consider the right blend of technology, human specialists and governance required to get the job done.

    The Challenges of Implementing DevOps

    One challenge of implementing DevOps is simply defining the position itself. “DevOps is not really a job,” Purighalla explained. Instead, it encompasses many aspects, such as CI/CD, provisioning, maintenance, and compliance, all of which now adopt a plethora of different tools. There is also overlap between CloudOps and DevOps, an ambiguity that makes it tricky to write a job description for a DevOps engineer.

    Various roles make up the teams responsible for modern cloud-native operations. In the same way that programmers have particular specialties, DevOps has specialized areas too. This segmentation might be based on the cloud vendor suite or the tools in use, such as familiarity with Jenkins, Docker or Kubernetes. Particular domains, such as DevSecOps or BizDevOps, may require dedicated focus as well. Purighalla shared some example roles that often exist in a modern CloudOps team:

    • Cloud architect
    • App architect
    • Security expert
    • Compliance expert
    • DevOps engineer for AWS
    • DevOps engineer for Azure
    • SRE for AWS
    • SRE for Azure

    Complicating things further, DevOps can transcend cloud-based systems and be applied to on-premises or edge network maintenance. Given the many possibilities, crafting a job description for a DevOps position requires “awareness of and vision for how you want to build the DevOps function in your organization,” said Purighalla. Unfortunately, most people don’t have a clear picture of where to begin, he said. Setting this roadmap will vary from sector to sector and require intimate knowledge of and context about the company and its technological assets.

    DevOps Shouldn’t Create Another Wall

    DevOps is a mechanism to deliver high-quality code more quickly—this business outcome has been the guiding principle since its origin. To get there, DevOps sought to place development and operations ‘in the same room’ to reduce friction. Yet, in some organizations, DevOps emerged as an entirely new role on an org chart. “In certain cases, it created a wall,” says Purighalla. “Developers can’t think beyond when they hand off code to the infrastructure team.”

    If this wall stays in place, it could further divide team motivations. Of course, building a healthy DevOps culture will vary from company to company and will require clarity about the end goal. But creating common incentives could include shifting left some security and provisioning responsibilities so developers have more perspective and can participate in DevOps.

    Another reason to embrace a DevOps culture is simply the talent scarcity in this arena. This is a problem facing businesses of all sizes. Startups may not be large enough to hire a DevOps or site reliability engineer, but are beginning to see the necessity of greater focus on reliability and compliance as a core business function, says Purighalla. Enterprises typically have multiple clouds and hybrid environments, which are challenging to find talent to support. Middle-market companies often lose out to the attractiveness of startups and the big bucks of large corporations.

    Outsourcing DevOps: Is It Ever a Viable Option?

    So, given that it is so challenging to find engineers, is outsourcing DevOps ever a viable option? According to Purighalla, “outsourcing is a good option if your company has pre-built solutions for clouds and if it’s able to give you similar capabilities without requiring ground-up custom work.” A cloud enablement solution could be used to reduce the barrier to entry but is never a replacement for an entire DevOps practice.

    The reason is that software programming is a creative engineering process. “I’ve never found an engineer that does the same thing every time.” People continue to experiment with a ‘build and fix’ mindset. This means that, in general, hiring external engineers is tricky as they don’t have intimate knowledge of the system at hand.

    Furthermore, a platform that applies a standard way of working with multiple cloud providers must be flexible and open to change, as backend infrastructure is constantly evolving. As such, DevOps must be viewed as something that’s much more continual and requires ongoing maintenance. It’s not something you can outsource once and be done with.

    “It’s becoming like accounting—you’ll fail an audit if you don’t do it,” said Purighalla. “Outsourcing needs to be viewed that way. You need to bring in a cloud enablement solution in combination with experts. You can’t have one or the other.”

    DevOps: Not Just a Role or Toolset

    Many assume that DevOps is just a set of tools. Instead, some experts argue that DevOps is more of a combination of varying roles, tools and processes. “DevOps started as a model—it’s not a tool,” Purighalla reiterated.

    In essence, it’s more of a culture than a specific job title. And when viewed this way, organizations can begin to eliminate silos, which DevOps ought to eradicate in the first place. With the right technology and collaborative spirit, a company can create a culture that meets the goals of efficiency that DevOps aims to achieve.

  • Can We Do Without DevOps?

    Can We Do Without DevOps?

    Recently, DevOps has received so much hype and every respectable company sees it as its duty to have a DevOps team on and running. It is considered to be so beneficial to any company that a non-technician scrolling down posts at any tech website would think of it as a universal remedy for all the corporate diseases ever possible. However, given that a definition of DevOps varies from company to company and no one exactly knows what a true DevOps team should do, isn’t there some misconception between the praise that DevOps has been receiving and the real output? Let’s dig deeper and decide for ourselves.

    Yet, despite the buzz around the notion, DevOps is said to be a working thing. It guarantees a company-adopter 200 times more frequent deployments, 24 times faster recovery and three times lower change failure rates, according to Puppet’s State of DevOps Report.

    That is why, to get a non-biased view on why one should “DevOps-ize” corporate processes, in our article we give the answers to the following:

    • What DevOps is?
    • What issues is it supposed to help resolve?
    • What does a DevOps engineer do?
    • What skills does a DevOps engineer need?

    All of these questions, when answered, will help us see why the industry has adopted DevOps as a regular practice, why your company needs to try it out and why we can’t do without it the way we used to before—or can we?

    What Is DevOps?

    According to the AWS, DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. Well, this definition may not be as clear as the waters of Sardinia, so we’ll clear it up for you a little bit.

    The message is that once (before DevOps) the product release was slow and troublesome, while today, with DevOps practices in place, it almost reaches cosmic speeds and high-end quality. All through maturation of work approaches and practices–merge of development and operations–along with the automation, cloud technologies, virtualization and abundance of top-notch tools. DevOps culture to a certain extent enables developers to perform the work of the IT team, and vice versa, which breaks down the operational walls between the teams, eroding a “not my task” mindset at the same time.

    What Does a DevOps Engineer Do?

    If that’s what is happening today–programmers deal with the configuration issues and the IT teams code–why is a DevOps engineer on the tip of everyone’s tongue? Why come up with a new term if you can write some more new responsibilities into the dev’s/IT guy’s contract and leave the names as they are? The thing is, the transformation of the processes and roles was so substantial, that in time they merged into a completely new position, which is neither a coding IT guy, nor a configuring developer.

    Roles Before DevOps

    Developers

    • Built features, tried to merge separate pieces of code together (usually resulted in a huge amount of errors and ended up in a long and troublesome integration).

    Integrators or Production Facilitators

    • Known to have been engaged on huge banking/insurance projects.
    • The phenomenon had a limited application within the industry and this intermediary work piece was often shared between the devs and ops with varying success.

    IT/Operations

    • Fixed the developers’ mess and squeezed the available code (often requiring a lot of massaging) into the available infrastructure.
    • Supported tech life in the offices (repairs, tech support, configuration and security, etc.).

    Roles Today, Approximate Responsibilities Breakdown

    Developers

    • Specification-based code production.
    • Software components integration.
    • Troubleshoot, debug and upgrade of existing software.
    • Creation of technical documentation for reference and reporting.
    • Integrations implementation.

    DevOps Engineer

    • Infrastructure planning, testing and development.
    • Integrations implementation.
    • Updates and fixes.
    • Build tools to minimize errors and improve customer experience.
    • Develop software to integrate with internal back-end systems.
    • Production errors root cause analysis,
    • Investigation and resolution of technical issues, Level 2 tech support.
    • Script development to automate visualization.
    • Procedure design for system troubleshooting and maintenance.

    IT/Operations

    • Install and configure computer hardware, software, systems, networks, printers and scanners.
    • Monitor and maintain computer systems and networks.
    • Service issues and requests.
    • Technical support across the company.
    • Set up accounts for new users.
    • Repair and replace equipment as necessary.

    To sum it all up, a DevOps engineer is a so-called “centaur” performing duties of a system administrator between coding sessions. His/her primary objective of the project is to find a solution that will make product deployment fast and efficient and people’s (devs and ops) lives easier.

    What Skills Does a DevOps Engineer Need?

    According to the Qulix’ practice, an ideal skillset for a DevOps is:

    • A technical graduate.
    • Intermediate or advanced English.
    • General programming skills.
    • Proficient PC-user knowledgeable about networking, Git, Linux, Docker, Nginx, Bash.
    • Strive for constant perfection and thirst for the new.
    • Curios, with inner drive to get to the bottom line, enthusiastic.
    • Strong work ethic and time management skills.
    • Open and a great team player.

    These will do for a start. At the same time, within the same company various departments may require from their DevOps engineers to have a command of different technologies. For example, another department of ours expects from their candidates to know TCPIP, DNS, Nginx, Tomcat, Git, Bash, Groovy, Ansible, Docker, Ubuntu, Debian, Macos, Gradle, Maven, CI/CD.

    As you can see, an ideal fit for the position of a DevOps engineer within a specific department is something rare. All because DevOps engineers have to have so much on their plate, both from technical and soft skills perspective. Why? First of all, as a system administrator to a certain degree, a DevOps engineer has to operate numerous technologies, that sometimes far outweigh the number of those a regular developer uses on a daily basis. In this connection, I once asked a friend of mine working in a DevOps team, “Of all the difficult things that you have to deal with as a DevOps guy, which one is the most difficult one?” And his response was “Everything.” 

    The “everything” of my friend needed further explanations, for which I headed to another DevOps engineer of Qulix Systems, Denis Golovnev. He told me he opted for a DevOps position because he wanted to get to know the whole SDLC closer and in depth, as “this position requires a 360-degree knowledge of the SDLC processes.” DevOps guys are among those few specialists who stay on the project from start to finish, to maintenance. That is why “a DevOps engineer won’t only have to dig deeper into his/her own area of knowledge, but also target adjacent spheres to see how the product is created and how his/her actions can create more value for the client,” explained Golovnev. Thus, this made the tech part clear to me.

    What about soft skills?

    “The most difficult thing about DevOps is to arrange the processes in a manner that will suit everyone; the one that will encourage the initiative and individual decision-making process, to a reasonable extent,” said Golovnev. “To achieve that, highly developed soft skills are a must to get to the root of the problem and enable an engineer to outline clearly his/her point of view to everyone.”

    On the other hand, DevOps team will inevitably face both technical and organizational issues, which should not be confused.

    “One should not try to settle human-related issues through technical means,” said Golovnev. This is another reason why a candidate without highly developed soft skills is very unlikely to get the position. Soft skills are the absolute killer thing for a DevOps candidate.

    To Wrap It Up

    We’ve been gradually migrating from slow and troublesome product releases and delivery of separate work chunks to a speedy, orderly and consistent performance. Most definitely, this transition isn’t the consequence of DevOps practices implementation alone. But without it, without the culture of speedy collaborative delivery, dynamic issues resolution and ultimate automation, which are typical of the DevOps philosophy, the shift would be impossible.

    Furthermore, the revolution starts from minds, whereas the means comes later. If a typical DevOps engineer is, as according to Golovnev, “the one in love with his/her job, insane as to automate everything within his/her reach, get to the core of any constrain that impedes fast product delivery or reduces effectiveness,” no wonder we, as consumers, and the whole industry need them. Together with the outstanding tools and technologies, a DevOps engineer is a soldier that, in 100% of cases, shoots to kill (any production constraint).

    One issue, however, remains unclear. With all the variances as to what true DevOps means even within the same company, how will we reach a unified DevOps definition? Most definitely, some unanimity would be useful for the candidates that try to land the position but end up rejected due to the above-mentioned differences in DevOps visions among the companies.

    On the other hand, lack of unambiguity is justified due to a wide range of technologies as well as different approaches used by different companies. So far, skillset variance will stay a key problem in regards to DevOps hiring. Although our main question–can we do without DevOps?–is out of the question.

    — Veronica Chizh

  • Important DevOps Roles Every Organization Needs to Succeed

    Important DevOps Roles Every Organization Needs to Succeed

    There is no agreement between the scholars and the practitioners of what the DevOps concept necessitates. There are many definitions available for the term “DevOps,” but it is the term used for emphasizing the collaboration between operations and development.

    Development (Dev): This is a process for creating a software product consisting of interrelated activities of software requirements, analysis, coding, architectural design, integration, testing and acceptance testing.

    Operations (Ops): This is a process of putting into use, and supporting end users in the use of, software product in the operational environment. Its activities include upgrade, installation, operation control, migration, configuration management, monitoring, alerting, support and availability.

    DevOps Roles Required for an Organization

    Many IT organizations are looking to embrace DevOps to increase their pace of software development and realize the business agility that stems from accelerating and streamlining the communications between operations and development.

    However, there is no fast or simple way to achieve DevOps. Many organizations have approached it as a pure technology play, but the successful path begins with the best people in the right DevOps roles with the right DevOps skills and an interest to collaborate.

    Experts in IT need to empower and employ evolving professional roles. Working as a lead change agent to supervise the transition, these DevOps roles include automation architects, security engineers, release managers, experience assurance experts, developer-testers and utility technology players who understand operations and development.

    DevOps Evangelist

    This individual needs to promote the benefits of DevOps by quantifying and identifying the business benefits that come from the higher agility that DevOps delivers. Reporting as a change agent, the DevOps evangelist ensures buy-in from operational and development teams, recognizes the important roles to handle DevOps delivery methods and ensures IT professionals are empowered and trained to make those changes.

    Release Manager

    The release manager is responsible for addressing the coordination and management of the product from development through production. Primarily they work largely on technical details and obstacles project managers are not involved with. Release managers supervise the integration, coordination, development, testing and deployment to support continuous delivery.

    Automation Architect

    The role of automation architect becomes important in DevOps, as this technology depends largely on automated systems. They are responsible for designing, analyzing and executing strategies for persistent integration while conforming high availability on pre-production and production systems.

    Software Developer/Tester

    The heart of the DevOps organization is the role of a software developer. Under this technology, the title of a software developer will stay the same, but the job of a tester/developer slowly raises the scope of responsibilities. These developers are not only responsible to convert new requirements into code, but also deploy, unit test and handle the ongoing monitoring.

    Experience Assurance Professional

    While the quality assurance function is frequently part of the software development, a new type of control becomes necessary when organizations adopt DevOps. The need for QA testers is being replaced with a need for XA experts charged with making sure that new functions are launched with the end user experience in mind.

    Security Engineer

    Considering the conventional waterfall development, system security is immensely an afterthought. It is a nonfunctional condition that, such as QA, is frequently tacked on toward the end of the system development. DevOps-minded stores have security engineers working side by side with programmers, incorporating their recommendations much earlier on in the process.

    Utility Technology Player

    Traditional IT operations or systems management professionals concentrate on maintaining the servers running. The primary cause of service interruption is likely to be the applications being run on these servers, so the administrators introduce very strict controls on what’s allowed to operate on their servers. They need extensive QA in a staging environment, large transfer and operations documentation and very rare issues. Traditional programmers have been heads down-coders without any involvement in post production systems.

    Conclusion

    A successful DevOps implementation is one that begins with the best people in the right DevOps roles to address all aspects and promote the speed and agility afforded by DevOps.

    — Saikumar Talari