DevOps is the latest trend, but many friends still don't know what DevOps engineers are doing?
DevOps engineers bridge the gap between software development and operations teams in the purest way to improve software delivery rates.
What DevOps engineers bring
The traditional software development process is that software developers spend weeks and months writing code, then handing the code to the QA team for testing, and then handing the final release version to the operations team for deployment. All three phases, namely development, testing, and deployment, lack collaboration.
The developer writes the code and hands it to the deployment team. It is now up to the deployment team to solve the problems in the code deployment process, or to hand over the code to the development team to fix the bug. All of these cause the software development process to slow down.
But in DevOps mode, the three teams will no longer be isolated from each other. Most of the time, these three teams will be merged into one team, and engineers will work throughout the application life cycle, from development and testing to deployment to operation, and develop a series of skills that are not limited to a single function. The security team can also work more closely with development and operation and maintenance throughout the entire application generation cycle.
Why are the roles of DevOps engineers different?
DevOps engineers are not new. It is a general term for a class of engineers, such as system engineers, automation construction engineers, software engineers, Linux engineers and so on.
However, the nature of DevOps engineers' work varies by component. In some cases, their job is to automate and maintain the infrastructure. Some components extend their work to the entire delivery chain.
The role of a
DevOps engineer varies, because he must collaborate with developers and operators by overcoming traditional barriers to collaboration. And different organizations will have different barriers to collaboration in this process.
The two most important aspects of the daily work of DevOps engineers
Although the roles of
DevOps engineers are diverse, almost all DevOps engineers touch on two things every day-automation and continuous integration.
automation
Most tasks related to maintaining the infrastructure are still manual. Companies prefer to use traditional, mature methods, not the same automated processes, because they do not want to take any risks. But the fact is that automated tasks will help speed up software development and deployment, which means faster cash transfers from customer accounts to company accounts.
Be aware of this, for example, if the task of a system engineer is to manually back up all servers twice a day, it is a waste of time, because by writing scripts, automatic backup of servers in some cloud facilities can easily achieve this. By automating the backup process, you can allow system engineers to focus more on key issues, such as troubleshooting server shutdowns due to certain VM issues. Performing the same operation manually will cause the system engineer to be overburdened, and its efficiency will be greatly reduced. This is just a very simple example to illustrate the waste of resources caused by not turning to automation.
DevOps can be seen as an extension of Agile, because it can reduce the risks that may arise due to poor collaboration between the development team, QA, and the deployment team. DevOps expands the scope of agile principles by recognizing the fact that high-quality software requires the continuous participation and feedback of all stakeholders, including QA and operations experts.
There are many things that can be done in an automated way, such as updating the Apache Web server with new patches and updating the version of open source software deployed on the server when it is released.
DevOps engineers can automate the process of configuring servers by creating a scripting environment. You can run the script on one node, but if it is not thousands of nodes, it will become impractical to run the same script on hundreds of nodes. The script is not a scalable solution here.
Therefore, there is a need to automate software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment across a large number of nodes in a scalable manner. This is where configuration management tools like Chef, Puppet, and Ansible come in handy in the DevOps world.
Continuous integration
Another important aspect of DevOps is continuous integration (CI), which is a software practice that allows developers to continuously update changes to a single warehouse for automated building and testing.
A continuous integration system usually includes a tool to monitor the version control system. Whenever a change in the version control system is monitored, the continuous integration system will automatically build and test the application. If the build or test fails, the system will immediately notify the developer to solve the problem.
Continuous integration ensures continuous delivery because all code changes are continuously deployed into the test and production environment after the build phase.
Using continuous integration, developers can free themselves from manual tasks and improve their work efficiency, which can now be done in CI in an automated manner; due to frequent testing, errors and bugs will be easier to find and reduce; can be faster Provide updates to end users more frequently.
There are multiple products and tools that can help you achieve continuous integration in your organization.
Some tools allow you to host CI servers in your own network infrastructure. The most popular one is Jenkins, which was renamed from Sun's Hudson project.
There are other hosted CI products, such as CircleCI and Travis CI, which are completely hosted
in the cloud. These managed CI products are becoming more and more popular, especially for small companies or organizations, because it allows the engineering team to start continuous integration as quickly as possible.
to sum up
The most important role played by DevOps engineers is to bridge the gap between the development team and the operation and maintenance team and increase the software delivery rate.
Although the roles of DevOps engineers vary by organization, there are two common aspects: automation and continuous integration.
