Why do we need DevOps?

In this post i am sharing  What is DevOps and why do we need DevOps Engineer for IT Industry. DevOps simply enables development and operation teams to work together. It reduces the time that is taken by teams to reflect the changes. DevOps environment can be accomplished via various tools, technologies, and processes. It simply denotes the quick way to develop software with maximum efficiency. The main goal of DevOps is to increase the quality of product to a great extent and to increase the collaboration of Development and Operation team as well so that the workflow within the organization becomes smoother.

Overall, the everyday task of a DevOps architect is to look after every software development process and create an automated, efficient delivery pipeline that helps build software rapidly and effectively. 

The industry today is moving towards automation. We want to get rid of manual work which is prone to errors, inefficient and expensive. This is exactly what DevOps focuses on. With the wide range of tools provided, everything is organized and automated. A small team of skilled employees can take the responsibility which previously required teams of even 100 people! DevOps also brings together the development and operations team under one umbrella. This means, they now share ideas and understand each other's responsibilities better. All this gives better output at a quicker pace with lesser iterations.

That was from the industry perspective. The importance of DevOps on a personal level is also crucial to understand. Having the skills to be a DevOps engineer, makes you indispensable in the long run. You will be filling the shoes of probably 10 other employees who are sticking to the traditional approaches. DevOps culture improves the IT service delivery agility on the basis of: Communication, Collaboration Integration. It is the platform that identifies the relationship between various tools, ideas, and themes of software development and IT operations, using rapid iterations and continuous improvement. 

What is DevOps?

In this post you will learn what is DevOps and what are requirements to become DevOps developer.DevOps is a new way of how software companies work and it's a new culture and practice which aims at facilitating smooth communication and collaboration between development and operations teams of a software company to increase development, deployment, accuracy, and automation of a software manufacturing company.

The professionals who are certified in DevOps & possess an immense knowledge of all the applications of this domain are welcomed by most of the top-notching multinational organizations with exclusively high pay packages.

who can take this course?

1. Programmers
2. Software Developers
3. application developers
4. IT professionals
5. Technical project managers.
6. Business professionals.
7. Operations managers.
8. Architects
9. Job seekers etc.

Prerequisites and Requirements:

• Ability to install software
• Ability to use git
• Some experience with programming (even just scripting in shell)
• Some experience as SysAdmin; some experience with Linux is beneficial

Where to Begin?

Understand DevOps Principles and Why DevOps is a culture before you start focusing on the tools for DevOps. One way to begin that journey is by reading the book/novel – The Phoenix Project. Even though it’s a work of fiction it helps in enabling the reader to gain more insight into the DevOps concepts in a very practical manner. Both in a business as well as technical point of view the reader will start to make sense of why both as an individual and an organization you need to adopt DevOps.

There’s no way around this and I am sure DevOps engineers who came from development background will agree to this. You need to be aware of what the developer is actually doing during the coding , development , testing and deployment process.

For people from operations, system administration background or freshers – I am not saying you need to learn development in depth or become an expert in development/programming. Rather, if you want to effectively implement the said DevOps practices and tools, you need to think like the developers, understand their requirements and give them the best solution.

Basic to intermediate knowledge in various programming languages and frameworks will help you in a long way. This is why many DevOps engineers who worked as developers for few years are very successful in their career.

So to summarize, understand what the developers do during the development process of the software. How they manage their versions of code, integrating the code into existing code base, resolving merge conflicts and how they are compiling and deploying them to the servers (even though Ops team handles this, developers also do play their part).

Once you have understood how things are done manually with no automation tools, then you can bring DevOps practices and tools more effectively into the picture.

Unless you are good in Ops you aren't gonna become an expert in DevOps. You need to become very familiar and have expertise in system engineering/administration before you embark you DevOps journey. You can begin this by,

• Learning Installation and Administration of various Linux Distros
• Start learning how to do scripting, learn bash, Perl, python, ruby etc ( be an expert of at-least one scripting language other than bash script)
• Know how to setup Web Servers, DNS Servers, load balancer’s – Apache, Nginx
• Learn how to setup proactive monitoring for the infrastructure and software
• Deep understanding of Networking Concepts – example – IP Gateways, TCP, CID, ARP, etc
• Understand how to do deployment of various artifacts manually to the servers
• Gain expertise in various RDBMS systems such as PostgreSQL
• Expertise in fileSystem management such as ext,ext4, NFS ext.
• I know that the list looks pretty exhaustive. But trust me, it’s not. As you start to gain expertise in each of the above tools, frameworks, process and various technologies you’ll start to gain more knowledge in more related/dependent tools, Operating Systems, System Applications etc.