What is DevOps?

- DevOps, you've probably seen the term or heard it used, but it's not always clear what people mean by it. Okay, so let me ask you, Ernest, what do you think it means? - The term DevOps itself combines two traditional roles in tech, the developers, who typically write application code, and the operations engineers, who set up and manage the systems that the applications run on top of. These two bodies of work combine to create an overall service that people can use. - But these roles keep changing as technology changes. And in the late 2000s, it became clear that it didn't make sense to keep these roles as two completely disconnected groups. And so DevOps was born. - [Ernest] DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers working together through the entire service lifecycle, from the design and development process, all the way to production support, including both the applications and the systems. - Of course, there are lots of specialized roles in the IT world. Front end devs, test engineers, build engineers, networking engineers, and security engineers, to name a few. The intent is to bring them all together to collaborate instead of just having them do their work in isolation and hoping that everything works smoothly when finally brought together. - Even the database admins? - Ah yes, even the DBAs fit inside of DevOps, everyone who practices and participates in creating and running a service. - DevOps is also characterized by operations engineers using development techniques for their systems work - In DevOps, systems engineering works just like a software development workflow. Code to create, configure, and operate the system is checked into source control to go through build, test, and deployment. It's a change from the largely manual system administration processes of the past. - But we understand that that's a broad enough definition. It doesn't really tell you much about what it is. We like to break explaining DevOps down into three levels, the values, the principles, and the practices. - We'll discuss these three levels in the course. But first, let's address the big question. Why should you care? What can DevOps do for you? And why would you want to practice it? - The bottom line is that DevOps is shown to be effective in improving both IT and business outcomes. Google's DevOps Research and Assessment Team does an annual global survey of all kinds of IT organizations to perform statistically sound analysis on what IT practices correlate to successful business results. The 2021 State of DevOps Report indicated that there's a big difference between elite and low-performing IT teams, and that the gap is getting larger. Elite teams deployed changes 973 times more frequently with 6,570 times shorter lead times than low IT performers. And while you might think that moving more quickly would produce lower quality, instead, they had three times fewer failures and recovered from issues 6,570 times faster than those low-performing organizations. And those elite teams are much more likely to be using DevOps practices like continuous integration, site reliability engineering, and deployment automation. - Statistically, companies that are high IT performers spend 22% less time on unplanned work and rework, and they're more than twice as likely to achieve their organizational objectives, ship products, and attain customer satisfaction. And perhaps most importantly for those of us who do the work, this heightened productivity actually makes practitioners half as likely to suffer from burnout. These benefits are huge. - Absolutely, James, and the survey showed that these results held true across different sizes and types of businesses, including for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. - It also works for both product engineering type organizations and internal IT organizations. Different DevOps practices and tools are more relevant for one type of work or another, but at a high level, the principles and methods help all kinds of technology teams. So, Ernest and I, we've been practicing DevOps since it started and it's helped us both deliver solutions in a variety of companies for more than a decade now. - And this section wouldn't be complete without saying what DevOps is not. It's not just a new name for an operations team, or a new name for an existing job title. It's not one person doing every single job, and it doesn't require using any specific tool. - Keep in mind that a lot of people use the term DevOps without really understanding what it means. So always check what you're hearing against the core concepts of DevOps. - And maybe invite those people to take this course. - Yep, DevOps has plenty of room for everyone.