DevOps is a subset of Software Engineering. Can we quit the DevOps Engineering vs Software Engineering debate already?

DevOps started as a philosophy – a way to bridge the gap between operations teams and software engineering teams in order to provide more efficiency and transparency. Why should people who develop the software not care about how it operates? Why should the people who operate the software not care about how it was developed? This is worth thinking about.

In the modern day and age, the term “Software Engineer” is actually vast. Software Engineering is a gigantic field with many subsets.

Some of these subsets include:

• Web Development (full-stack, frontend, and backend)

• Mobile Development (full-stack, frontend, and backend)

• Game Development

• Systems Engineer

• Data Engineering

• Site Reliability Engineer

• Machine Learning Engineering

• Virtual Reality Engineering

• Desktop Application Developer

Do you want to know another subset? DevOps!

Yes, DevOps in the modern era is nothing but a subset of Software Engineering. That’s going to trigger a whole lot of people who come from the operations side of things, but it’s true.

Essentially, a modern DevOps Engineer is a software engineer who focuses on infrastructure, automation, and internal tooling. These are the folks who write code to make sure that all the other code that was written, works as expected.

Sure, they may use more pre-made tools than web developers. But web developers use plenty of tools and pre-made services too. Modern web development, in fact, is all about glueing together pre-made services, and there are plenty of subsets that I listed above that are too heavy too (like data engineering).

Similar “DevOps Engineer” titles include:

• Platform Engineer

• Cloud Engineer

• Infrastructure Engineer

• Systems Engineer

The titles are industry-specific. But I hope this clears things up for you who are wondering what DevOps is all about.

Basically, “Software Engineer vs DevOps Engineer” is like asking “What’s better, a vehicle or a truck??”

What are your thoughts?

Become a DevOps Engineer through our 8-week part-time & online course. Visit https://moringaschool.com/courses/devops-engineering/ to learn more and join our ongoing intake.

Connect with the author on Linkedin here: Cecilia Akinyi

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When it comes to creating secure code quickly and efficiently, DevOps is reigning supreme on a global level. Its market size has a compound annual growth rate of 18.95%, and it is expected to grow to approximately USD 12.2 million by 2026. The main reason why DevOps has become such a vital component in organizations is that it improves access management—and therefore, productivity. Traditional ops are around 41% more time-consuming than DevOps, and the latter is currently being used to improve the quality of software deployments, release new software more often, improve collaboration in teams, and improve code production quality. Despite its success, around 17% of IT decision-makers are still failing to rely on DevOps practices. The organizations they represent may have fallen prey to a few myths surrounding the subject of DevOps.

In this article, we debunk a few of the most prevalent myths around DevOps.

• DevOps Only Involves the DevOps Engineering Team

Interesting that many companies believe that once they hire DevOps engineers, they have all DevOps bases covered. In fact, DevOps only works if every single person in your team is well-versed in appropriate processes and means of collaboration. It also involves creating the right culture, so that team members can meet their profitability goals. Companies should aim to create a generative team culture that is highly collaborative and that identifies failures or flaws as providing vital insight into useful changes that can be implemented. Teams have to be able to make mistakes without fearing the consequences. 

• The Same Processes Work for All Projects

A select of processes—including those involving collaboration between team members—may work as a general rule. However, others may need to change across different projects. For instance, some projects may need just three or four environments, while others may require more because their software delivery cycle has various stages. Moreover, some projects need to receive various approvals before they are finalized, while others may require one or two. Customized processes should be created for different projects.

• DevOps Engineers Do Not Need People Skills

A DevOps engineer is responsible for all aspects of communication between businesses and their consumers. They not only need to be well-versed in a plethora of programming languages, but also need to be great communicators between engineering specialists and business groups. Their job also involves more than integrating development processes into workflows. They must also know how to integrate automation whenever possible. The check folder size in Google Drive function is a good example. The usual way to do this is to enter settings, and eventually get to the “buy storage” button, so you can see all the heavy files that are taking up the most space. If you are using another software that involves various files, and you’d like to know which files take up more space, however, then engineers may need to embrace specific extensions/toolkits that will enable them to add useful administrative options to a project.

• Using specific Tools Means You Are Part of the DevOps Movement

Some companies believe that they can harness the benefits of DevOps simply by using tools and services like Chef, Librato, or Azure. Tools are, indeed, vital when it comes to achieving your operation aims. However, tools only become handy once you have selected the right team and worked on creating an empathetic and forward-looking culture.

DevOps is changing the way companies do business, relying on philosophies, practices, and tools to increase an organization’s ability to deliver services and applications quickly. Among the many myths surrounding this subject is the idea that all companies need to do is hire talented engineers. In fact, they must work on rebuilding their company culture from the ground-up, so that the entire team embraces a growth mindset and understands that mistakes and flaws are the greatest teachers they could hope for.

Is your organization looking to upskill its tech team? Sign up to join our 8-week part-time DevOps Engineering course – https://moringaschool.com/courses/devops-engineering/

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Cloud computing is a model for delivering computing resources, including storage, networking, and processing power, over the internet. It is a powerful technology that aids organizations to implement DevOps strategies, enabling cultural and technological transformation needed to compete in the modern software marketplace.

Effective working of DevOps and Cloud computing enable the creation of efficient and agile software development and deployment processes. Cloud computing is very key in DevOps practices as it facilitates IT transformation with appropriate tools and automation. The full potential benefit of DevOps processes and way of thinking cannot be implemented with the omission of the cloud. The two are dependent on each other for a total gain of its importance to both developers and the organizations.

Let’s take a closer look at how these two technologies work together.

Centralized platform

DevOps platform for testing, deploying, and production is achieved through the centralized nature of cloud computing. DevOps practices ie. department interworking would not be achieved with the traditional distributed way of software deployment. The usage of cloud platforms curbs the various challenges experienced with decentralized or rather distributed systems.

Mobility & Flexibility

Cloud provides security gateways that facilitate enterprise resources to users from any part and device with network security still at its best. This mechanism enables enhanced collaboration of workers and project expertise. There are inbuilt security measures that help curb the vulnerabilities associated with easy access to resources by workers.

Self-service mechanism

Cloud computing also enables users to create self-service methods for provisioning infrastructure through various service catalogs ie AWS service catalog. Developers have the opportunity to develop new ideas, test the relevance of the idea and if they fail, redesign the idea. This helps in faster production of software products other than waiting for the whole IT team to provide such services to them.

Security measures

The integration of security into the cloud environment is done by the expansion of DevOps to DevSecOps. The idea of the DevSecOps team is to build and incorporate security into the DevOps lifecycle. Cloud security helps in managing digital resources, considering they are easily accessible, to avoid unreasonable risks.

Monitoring

Various cloud service providers offer monitoring and observability services, specifically designed for developers, DevOps engineers, and IT managers. The benefit of such services includes providing meaningful insights to monitoring applications, optimizing resource allocation, helping to respond to changes in performance, and offering a somehow unified system to keep track of the general behavior of the application.

Cloud computing has been able to reduce the time needed to access development platforms to minutes as opposed to the longevity of access before. Developers can seamlessly access platforms. For example, it instantiates a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), and sophisticated application ecosystems like SAP in just a click hence development is made easier.

Enhanced Productivity

Many business enterprises facilitate their DevOps teams to have an on-site platform or a blend of both cloud-based and on-site. For the enhancement of workers’ productivity, migrating to cloud solutions is such a need. The tools provided by the cloud enable the services such as continuous integration, testing, and deployment to occur hence enhancing production processes.

In a nutshell, by using DevOps and cloud infrastructure teams can move faster and release software more frequently, while also reducing the risk of errors and downtime.

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DevOps is becoming competitive and essential to implement. Enterprises that fall behind risk long-term success. Why do we say this? A DevOps culture aids in the automation of the process and the ending of gaps between development and IT. Yet, numerous enterprises are floundering to get DevOps working as per intended. It’s high time we make this a norm across IT-centric companies.

So, what is the secret to DevOps success? This is the question that this article seeks to answer.

1. Design for DevOps: Designers must thoroughly understand customer use cases. The design practices should support Ops; this is to say understanding delivery and deployment pipeline processes. The design should also offer support for quality assurance. Understanding the quality test processes is key, this can be done through pre-checked unit tests before committing to the integration/trunk branch. Appropriate design tools are also important for best design practices. These include elastic structures, monitoring tools, test tools, etc.
2. Collaborative culture: Proper alignment of goals and workflows are very essential for any organization’s success. DevOps practices aim to ensure team shifts from the traditional way of development cycles to collaborative engaging cycles. No amount of technology would achieve DevOps benefits without the collaboration of particular sectors of development ie. Developers, QAs, and Ops.
3. Continuous Integration (CI): this is a process in DevOps where changes are merged into a centralized repository after which the code is automated and tested. This merges decentralized developers’ working copies into a shared streamline several times a day. Continuous Integration is the best practice for software development that has a set of critical principles. Some of the principles of CI are revision control, automated testing, and build automation. The process is not known to get rid of bugs but makes it easy to find and remove bugs.
4. Continuous Testing(CT): This involves Devops practices where tests are done at every development life cycle. The goal of continuous testing is to evaluate the quality of the software as part of a continuous delivery process, by testing early and often. Traditional testing would rather hand off the whole software to the quality assurance department which would then carry out the tests. This would in turn require extensive time to do the same. The continuous testing adopted by businesses today offers early scrutiny of software hence faster delivery.
5. Continuous Monitoring(CM): Real-time lifecycle, intelligence, monitoring, and analytics are essential to speed up real-time decisions at each stage of the DevOps pipeline and avoid obstructions. Continuous control monitoring goes a long way to help enterprises acquire data from various ecosystems, which can then be used to take more robust security measures like threat assessment, quick response to breaches, root cause analysis, and cyber forensics. Also, continued monitoring keeps the processes on watch and checks on the general working of the DevOps setup.
6. Elastic infrastructure: resilient and elastic infrastructures perform much better. DevOps applies to many types of infrastructures that include virtualized functions, private and public clouds, private data centers, containerized packaged applications, hybrid cloud environments, and special-purpose bare-metal systems.
7. Continuous delivery: this involves the process of automating, building, testing, configuring, and deploying a build to a production environment. Successive environments support progressively longer-running integration, load, and user acceptance testing activities.

What are your thoughts on this? Any other best practices for DevOps success you can recommend? Put them in the comments section.

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What is DevOps culture? This is essentially about enhanced collaboration and shared accountability amongst operations and development processes. This supports businesses in bringing their tools, processes, and personnel into a more cohesive customer focus. It is an organizational culture shift focusing on continuous learning and improvement through team self-ruling, faster feedback, cross-team collaboration, and trust. Traditionally, development work happened in siloes but with DevOps culture, we have increased transparency, communication, and collaboration among teams.

It entails creating teams made up of individuals with diverse skill sets and backgrounds, who take responsibility for all aspects of a product, from conception to end-of-product. When developers are responsible for both building and running a product, it brings them closer to the end user, and they have a more comprehensive understanding of user requirements and needs. By involving operations teams in the development process, they can incorporate maintenance and customer needs, resulting in a better product.

Why then, should teams shift to DevOps culture? The benefits that come along with the adoption of this culture are massive. The core benefit is that DevOps culture encourages trust and teamwork leads to better decision-making and improves job satisfaction.

Below are some of the detailed benefits of adapting a DevOps Culture

1. Increased agility: DevOps agility means the organization’s capability to swiftly adapt to changes and seize new chances. This includes the speed of creating, testing, and releasing new software or services, as well as the ability to adjust and scale resources as needed. DevOps techniques such as continuous integration and deployment, automation, and teamwork between development and operations teams can enhance an organization’s agility. Furthermore, Agile techniques and Lean concepts are also instrumental in the DevOps culture to improve the speed of the development process.
2. Improved communication and collaboration: DevOps culture encourages collaboration between development and operations teams, leading to better communication and understanding of each other’s needs and challenges. Under a DevOps model, collaboration shifts the emphasis from individual team efficiency to overall performance because everyone is accountable for the outcome.
3. Faster software releases: This talks about speed. In a DevOps environment, automation, continuous integration and deployment, and teamwork between development and operations teams help to speed up software release cycles. Automating repetitive tasks and implementing CI/CD practices allow development teams to release software more quickly and with fewer errors.
4. Lowest possible production costs: In a DevOps culture, organizations strive for the lowest possible production costs through the use of automation, efficient resource management, and continuous improvement. By automating repetitive tasks and processes, organizations can reduce the need for manual labor and minimize the potential for human errors. Additionally, efficient resource management, such as utilizing cloud computing and containerization, can help to reduce costs associated with infrastructure and scaling.
5. Improved software quality: DevOps offers more advantages than the traditional approach as it simplifies identifying and resolving issues. With automated monitoring and regular checks, the team has more time to come up with new ideas as they can address problems more efficiently.
6. Continuous improvement: DevOps culture encourages teams to continuously improve their processes and tools, leading to more efficient and effective ways of working.
7. Increased competitiveness: By being able to release software quickly and frequently, teams can stay competitive in their industry by providing new products and services to customers faster.
8. Enhanced security: Security is integrated into the software development process from the beginning, rather than being treated as a separate step at the end. This means that security considerations are built into the design and development of software, and security testing is integrated into the continuous integration and deployment pipeline. This approach allows for early detection and resolution of security vulnerabilities and helps to ensure that software is delivered to production with a high level of security.
9. Reduced time-to-market: DevOps practices can help teams bring new products and features to market more quickly.

The above are just but the scope of DevOps culture benefits. Adopting a DevOps culture fully usually necessitates significant adjustments to work processes and therefore requires support from management. Challenges such as growing complexities, resistance to change, limited resources, lack of clear ownership and accountability, etc., have to be overcome as the organizations shift to this new culture.

Change Management – Considerations for transitioning to DevOps Culture

Some of the effective organizational changeover practices include;

1. Provide training and resources to support the transition, including tools and best techniques for automation, testing, and deployment.
2. Promote effective communication and teamwork among different teams, fostering a sense of shared responsibility and accountability.
3. Adopt an attitude of continuous improvement, consistently assessing processes and tools in use to ensure they are working effectively.
4. Establish clear metrics to track progress and measure the success of the transition.
5. Make certain that security and regulatory compliance are fully integrated.

In conclusion, embracing a DevOps culture can lead to a range of benefits for teams, including faster software releases, improved communication and collaboration between development and operations teams, increased agility, higher software quality, shorter time-to-market, increased competitiveness, and a continuous improvement mindset. These advantages can ultimately lead to greater efficiency in delivering software, resulting in increased business success and customer satisfaction.

If you are looking to upskill in DevOps individually or as a team, join our 8-week DevOps Engineering part-time course! Visit – https://moringaschool.com/courses/devops-engineering/ to learn more and apply.

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Did you know that the choice of the best DevOps tools for each stage in the Software Development & DevOps Life cycle is very key to achieving operational success? These tools should be focused on improving collaboration, reducing context-switching, introducing automation, and leveraging observability and monitoring to ship better software, faster.

The toolchain is categorized into two namely;

• all-in-one toolchain– uses one complete solution that doesn’t allow other tools to play a part.
• open toolchain – allows for customization with different tools with an open toolchain, there are preferred tools for the various stages of the DevOps lifecycle.

Read more to find out what the different phases are in a DevOps lifecycle and the tools required at each stage.

1. Planning Phase

Tools Used :- Jira Software, Confluence, and slack

High recommendable tools are tools that allow development and operations teams to break work down into smaller, manageable chunks for quicker deployments. Jira provides sprint planning, and issue tracking, and allows collaboration. These tools also encourage asynchronous brainstorming. It’s important that everyone can share and comment on anything: ideas, strategies, goals, requirements, roadmaps, and documentation.

2. Build phase

• Production-identical environments for development – Kubernetes and DockerDevelopers use open-source tools like Kubernetes and Docker to provision individual development environments.
• Infrastructure as code – Chef, Docker, Puppet, Ansible, and TerraformInfrastructure as code means you can easily spin up variations of your development environment with a similar configuration as production. It also implies that re-provisioning is faster than repairing and more consistent. These tools help in version control and continuous integration.
• Source control and collaborative coding tools like Bitbucket, GitHub, and GitLab. These tools enable source control support that helps store the code in different chains so you can see every change and collaborate more easily by sharing those changes.
• Continuous Delivery – Jenkins, AWS, Bitbucket, CircleCi, SonarSourceContinuous integration is the practice of checking in code to a shared repository several times a day and testing it each time. In that, you automatically detect problems early, fix them when they’re easiest to fix, and roll out new features to your users as early as possible.

3. Testing Phase

Tools Used:- MEND, mabl, snyk, VERACODE, stackhawk, XRAY, SmartBear

Automated testing pays off over time by speeding up your development and testing cycles in the long run. Test automation can increase software quality and reduce risk by doing it early and often. They also yield reports and trend graphs that help identify risky areas.

4. Deployment Phase

• Deployment standards- Jira SoftwareThis tool has a single dashboard integrated with your code repository and deployment tools. It gives you full visibility of branches, builds, pulls requests, and deployment warnings in one place.
• Automated deployment – Bitbucket, AWS Codepipeline tools. DevOps Engineers should try automating deployments to the lowest-level environment first, where you’ll be using that automation most frequently, then replicate that up to production.

5. Operations Phase

Tools Used:- Jira Service Management, Jira Software, Opsgenie, Statuspage

These tools enhance collaboration by making sure DevOps teams are viewing the same work.

6. Monitoring Phase

Tools Used:- AppDynamics, DataDog, Slack, Splunk, New Relic, Opsgenie, Pingdom, Nagios, Dynatrace, Sumo Logic

Ensures application and server performance monitoring. These tools ensure integration of your group chat client so alerts go straight to your team’s room, or a dedicated room for incidents.

7. Continuous Feedback Phase

Tools Used:- GetFeedback, Slack, Jira Service Management, Pendo

Analyzing and incorporating feedback may feel like it slows the pace of development in the short term, but it’s more efficient in the long run than releasing new features that nobody wants.

8. Discovery Phase

Tools Used:- Jira Product Discovery, Mural, Miro

Tools that encourage “asynchronous brainstorming” are highly recommended. It’s important that everyone can share and comment on anything: ideas, strategies, goals, requirements, roadmaps, and documentation.

Conclusion

Many companies are looking for talented DevOps engineers to remain competitive and up to speed in this agile industry. If you are looking to advance your career in this field. Sign up for our 8 weeks DevOps Engineering course and learn to design and deploy infrastructure as code, build and monitor CI/CD pipelines for different deployment strategies, Google Cloud Technologies and how to deploy scaleable microservices using Kubernetes. Apply Now –> https://bit.ly/3zfh6RT or email admissions@moringaschool.com for more information.

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DevOps Engineering teams can implement this shift of working from the cultural way of development to increase the speed and quality of software deployment. Implementing this agile way of working comes with greater benefits, tools, and lifecycle models and practices.

DevOps Lifecycle

The DevOps lifecycle stages occur in an infinite loop as they relate to each other. The stages include;

1. Plan
2. Build
3. Test
4. Deploy
5. Operate
6. Monitor
7. Continuous feedback
8. Discover*

DevOps Tools

This includes the tools that are essential in every stage of development. They include Jira Software, Bitbucket, Opsgenie, etc. The toolchain is categorized into two namely;

• all-in-one toolchain:- uses one complete solution that doesn’t allow other tools to play a part.
• open toolchain:- allows for customization with different tools.

DevOps Best Practices

They include;

• Continuous Integration
• Continuous Delivery
• Infrastructure as Code
• Microservices
• Monitoring and Logging
• Communication and Collaboration

DevOps Engineer roles

Some of the roles include;

Ready to begin your career in DevOps ?

Start learning with our 8-week practical and part-time DevOps Engineering Course. Apply Now –> https://bit.ly/3zfh6RT | Classes start in November

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