Truth About DevOps Vs Developers

A Quick Summary - This article explores the similarities and differences between the DevOps and Developers. It also discusses in detail the responsibilities of each career and How IT field is revolutionizing around these career options?

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It's a showdown between popular careers of the digital era Develops and DevOps. I suggest you stick around till the winner is finalized in the coming discussion.

Before you go to google and start searching for the definitions and then try to make sense out of it. Let me save the day (at least here) and transcend the knowledge upon you.

What is a Developer?

A Developer is a person who writes and debugs the code/program to build software.

So, What is DevOps?

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“DevOps is the integration of Software Development and IT Operations” (now you get this ‘DevOps’ Term?)

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Yes. It’s that much simple.

But what does that exactly mean?

Let me explain it further to make things clear…

In 2009, Patrick DuBois forged the term “DevOps” to indicate the collaboration and integration between people, processes and the tools in the software development industry.

Some of the people say “DevOps is a culture, not a role”. As it throws a light on a variety of aspects, different people have a different approach to it. They talk about DevOps being “a toolchain approach” or it is “ treating your code as infrastructure” or it is “using automation”.

They all are correct to some extent. But keep in mind Y'all…

DevOps aims to merge the operations and development in one big group. Being DevOps is - everyone's involvement in the product development life cycle to bring a positive change and span their knowledge and skills into new fields.

Gartner's definition of DevOps is:

"DevOps represents a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of agile, lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach. DevOps emphasizes people (and culture) and seeks to improve collaboration between operations and development teams. DevOps implementations utilize technology - especially automation tools that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic infrastructure from a life cycle perspective."

DevOps is feasible due to the availability of the tools and cloud services which make launch and monitoring easy. Due to the higher level of services such as Mongolab, Xeround, IronWorker, and Exceptional and many more, the need for devoted operations people has nearly vanished.

Enough said, Let's move on to the DevOps Toolchain.

DevOps Toolchain

It refers to the tools which help the movement of source code from one stage to another through development to deployment. A brief example will quite help here. So,

DevOps Toolchain List
Issue Tracking Tool: To increase adaptability and transparency	Jira
Collaboration Tool: To help the team work together more friendly and easily	Slack
Planning Tool: To plan towards the common goal while working together	Asana
Configuration Management Tool: Enforcing the intended stability at scale	Puppet, Chef
Continuous Integration Tool: To allow in-process testing and validation of the code	Jenkins, Bamboo
Monitoring Tool: To ensure the optimal performance	BigPanda, Sensu
Binary Repositories: To store the releases to get rid of starting from the scratch	Artefact, Nexus
Automated Test Tool: To verify the code quality	Telerik, TestComplete
Deployment Tool: To release an application to production at any time	XebiaLabs
Handling Database: To keep all the manufacturing process organized	DBmaestro

This list is just a minimal representation of which tools you can use at different stages. There is a wide range of tools in the market fitting your requirements.

What a DevOps should know?

Having expertise in the following fields, and you can call yourself a DevOps Engineer!
A solid understanding of these fields will help you perform your job efficiently.

• Linux
• Python
• Golang
• AWS
• Google Cloud

Let's talk about them in a bit detail…

Linux - For you to be a successful DevOps, the knowledge of Linux is a must thing. The best practice to learn it by installing it on your computer and get your hands dirty. Don’t hesitate to explore new ideas. Meanwhile you may get stuck or get into a problem but eventually, you will learn a great deal.

Python - A powerful programming language! Having the basic concepts of python hurts no one. But if you really want to be successful DevOps, then you must have a hands-on grasp on Python (Btw it's the hot language of the era, in case you want to switch the profession).

Amazon Web Services - AWS provides the richest tools to work with cloud services. Learning cloud services will really be a plus point for you. Google cloud services and Azure could also prove helpful. But getting your hands on AWS is the safest play.

DevOps Best Practices

Past methods of application development are just vanishing, and you really need to learn the practices that are prevailing as the top choice of the developers. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery is so necessary for DevOps engineers.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

To deliver recurring and reliable code changes, CI/CD pipeline approach is one of the best practice for DevOps.

Continuous Integration is to build an automated way to build, package and test applications. Hence enhancing the collaboration among teams and producing better quality software products.

Continuous Delivery initiates after CI. CD automates the delivery of the application to certain selected architecture environments. Teams are more likely to work with different environments such as development, testing, and deployment. CD makes sure to deliver the code changes from environment to environment.

This brings us two important aspects…

• Continuous Testing
• Continuous Monitoring

CI/CD are both meaningless without Continuous Testing and Continuous Monitoring. Because the main objective is to deliver the quality applications and code changes to the other involved infrastructure in the process.

CI/CD practice addresses the biggest issue in the IT industry - the misalignment between the developers and the operations. Teams in a project need to create understanding about the best approaches for the business can flourish without any major difficulties.

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Clustox covers many practices such as Agile, DevOps and Development that are indispensable to the successful digital transformation programs. They deliver all of that and they do it fast. Keep your business moving at Clustox.

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