According to Wikipedia, the architect is the person who plans, designs, and inspects the structure of the building. The world is changing, and now the position of
DevOps architect has appeared, but it has never replaced the former architect. In fact, these two positions currently exist in modern society.
The architect discussed in this article is in the field of network technology. Through this article, I hope you can understand the position of DevOps architect and its work content.
A day of DevOps architects
This topic is a bit big. In the industry, people who practice DevOps have many job titles. "DevOps Engineer", "DevOps Architect", "Product Release Engineer", "
Automation Architect", "Configuration Management Engineer", "Development and Operation Engineer" and so on. But the real challenge is how to use DevOps as a methodology rather than a pure technology to understand in depth.
DevOps allows development and operations teams to collaborate with each other, reducing the team's time to respond to changes. With some tools, techniques and processes, a DevOps environment can be realized. It points the way to efficient software development.
According to the 2017 Open Source Work Report of the Linux Foundation, DevOps work skills (57%) rank among the top three most popular skills, second only to
cloud/virtualization technology (60%) and application platform development (59%). 42% of companies are keen to include DevOps skills in recruitment requirements.
The focus of customer questions and discussions has changed from "
What is DevOps?" to "How do we implement DevOps on a large scale?"-said Robert Stroud, Forrester's principal analyst.
DevOps is not just a cultural change, or a thinking, a set of technologies. DevOps is a way to look forward.
From the definition of roles and responsibilities, DevOps architects also need some additional leadership qualities except for similarities to DevOps engineers.
"Each organization has a different structure, which depends on people, projects and processes"
The DevOps architect is responsible for:
-Analyze, execute and simplify DevOps practices;
-Use the right tools to automate the process;
-Promote the development process and deployment operation and maintenance;
-Establish proper DevOps processes in the organization;
-Establish a continuous release structure environment to accelerate the software development and deployment process;
-Design and build a comprehensive, comprehensive and efficient practice specification;
-Guide developers and operation and maintenance teams when problems occur;
-Monitor, review and manage technical operators;
-Team management ability with leadership thinking.
Essential skills for DevOps architects:
-Has many years of experience in using continuously updated tools to build large-scale software
-Technical expertise and creativity
-Has leadership thinking
-Good at communication
-Possess the latest development knowledge about tools and technologies
-Proficient in various concepts
-Team incentives
-Extensive hands-on experience
-Extraordinary cross-functional leadership skills
-Efficient problem solving ability
-Configuration management capabilities
To successfully implement DevOps in an organization, the key is to establish a corresponding culture. Take a look at some cases:
"We need to understand how the efforts and investments made in DevOps have improved our business level. Obviously the data proves everything."-Tim Buntel, Vice President of Products at XebiaLabs, said.
Significance of hiring DevOps architects/engineers:
The role of
DevOps architect/engineer is crucial in today's job market. With the popularity of agile software development culture, professional technicians with efficient communication and collaboration capabilities are more popular.
Here are a few key reasons:
-They are able to cooperate skillfully;
-They are good at communication;
-They have experience in creating DevOps culture;
-They can control the planning, testing and development of the infrastructure;
-They can ensure the safety and efficiency of the entire organization;
-They encourage teams to deliver software products with fewer errors and faster;
-They have a clear understanding of DevOps tools, structures, processes, and thinking;
-They anticipate needs, accumulate resources, and plan accordingly;
-They examine problems with automation, version control, and overall security, and propose the necessary steps to quickly resolve these problems.
How DevOps architects overcome the shortcomings of traditional software models
Respond to changes:
This is one of the main problems of the traditional software development model. The code is modified, and changes in the production environment take time, which usually delays product release.
DevOps architects/engineers can overcome this problem by implementing
CI/CD pipelines to accelerate development, testing, and release.
Uninterrupted feedback and monitoring chain:
When it comes to traditional software development models, such as the waterfall model, the feedback cycle is very long from inspection, modification to implementation.
Now with automated delivery processes, continuous feedback and monitoring throughout the organization will become easy.
Publish frequently and reliably:
Version control, update, and release are the pain points of traditional software development models such as iteration, spiral, and waterfall. It reduces the time to market for enterprise applications, even if only because of a minor bug fix.
DevOps architects/engineers can solve this problem with high efficiency and speed because they tend to use tools and strategies to build a bridge between "development" and "operation and maintenance".
What are the reasons for organizations to hire DevOps architects? Does your organization need it?
As we discussed earlier, DevOps has become increasingly popular, and every organization has established this culture or claimed to do so. But tools alone are not enough to establish a DevOps environment. Organizations also need to do DevOps related training for each member.
When DevOps has become a hot topic for many large organizations, small organizations or non-technical companies may not care about it.
A powerful driving force for the popularity of DevOps is the potential to simplify the development, deployment, and maintenance processes through continuous integration, deployment, and testing. However, many ideas and opinions mislead DevOps's original goals.
Before hiring any DevOps engineer/architect, you need to consider several factors: team size, performance, requirements, and overall business model.
The organization hires them because: they promote the formation of a full, real-time, fast, automated and efficient development culture among software development teams; they can become an excellent leader, mastering the relevant knowledge of each tool and concept in detail.
This is what
DevOps architects do!
They look at the big picture and eliminate bottlenecks by applying suitable tools and personnel.
