About DevOps
DevOps was born in context of digital transformation with the main purpose of improving the delivery process for a faster time to market.
DevOps refers to a collection of domains that “emphasize the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes.”
Now, what do DevOps and Agile methodologies have in common? Well, for a start, DevOps boosts the organization’s growth by relying on more frequent iterations in the software development process. And how is this technology going to do all that? Simply by enhancing communication, collaboration and integration at three important levels: development, operations and testing.
Have we got your attention?
Maybe one of the best things about DevOps is that it provides the right ground for everyone to be transparent with one another. This is also important for the security team, which might not have complete control over network operations and the different systems. All the involved persons, from database and network administrator and business stakeholders to developers, are made “situationally aware” with the automation of data collection and data analysis across all concerned domains.
Just imagine the perks of having a team that truly works together!
Why?
The benefits of using DevOps in your organization are threefold since it helps your:
Development
IT operations
Business
But besides helping the relationship between Development and Operations, between IT and your business, as well as between your company and your customers and employees, another great asset of DevOps resides in the improvement of customer experience through higher-quality and faster deliveries to your end users.
But since DevOps is the new buzzword in Europe, there is no strict definition of the role or the job itself, which also allows a certain level of flexibility when applying or using certain concepts or tools.
For a DevOps Engineer, there are various types of knowledge and also many tools available out there.
Assisted by our team of experts, we’ve gathered some information, and we’ve sketched the relevant fields and skills a DevOps Engineer should be familiar with and, respectively, possess:
Coding skills - a programming language - basics knowledge about how scripts can be developed or infrastructures created by means of code in order to automate things (e.g. Bash Linux scripting, Python, Powershell, Perl, Ruby or JavaScript, etc.)
Configuration / orchestration tools (e.g. Puppet, Ansible, Chef, Salt, etc. – tools that are doing multiple configurations on multiple servers at once)
Continuous integration tools (e.g. Jenkins for deployment process automation)
Containerization platforms (e.g. Docker)
Cloud platforms from the perspective of a solution architect (e.g. Amazon Web Services, Google or Azure)
Applications servers (e.g. Apache web server or Tomcat application server).
For our new quiz, our focus lies on the following tools and domains: AWS, Puppet, Jenkins & CI, Apache & Tomcat & MySQL, Linux & Bash.
Example of a question from our DevOps quiz:
References:
What is DevOps?
Automate, integrate, collaborate: Devops lessons for security
25 Advantages of DevOps