DevOps Defined

Though it may not be hard to find laborious attempts to define this largely new stream of work in the IT industry to be theoretically accurate, its understanding on the floor would depend on whom you ask. More than the accuracy of its definition I am interested in exploring the reasons for its emergence and discussing the relevance of its role in delivering high quality service to the clients and end-users.

During the era of in-premise software, the responsibility of product development group usually ended when build & release team began preparing the software for cutting CDs and for clients to download. The software deployment and applying patches were done by the client’s IT department, with some or no help from professional services group. Even though product support group took the heat from clients whenever nasty bugs were discovered in the product, the onus of handling production issues were left with client’s IT department. And of course, the IT departments had to deal with their own internal users.

The advent of web consumer applications and SaaS products changed all that. With multi-tenant deployments of software applications in the Cloud that are expected to be available 24x7, any undiscovered defects in the product and issues with availability of the applications would soon get escalated to the top management by clients anytime. Though it might be impossible to release a bug-free product and ensure 100% availability, taking preventive maintenance of the system and responding quickly to incidents reported in production became very important. An in-premise software installation typically had thousands of users, but a consumer web app or SaaS app would have millions of users which required scaling up of production operations.

It became obvious that to deliver a high quality software solution to clients, support of a high quality operations team is required and their skills should be much broader than the traditional skill-sets of system and database admins and application support engineers. Scaling up of operations needed serious automation in areas beginning platform and product deployment through monitoring, and that required scripting and coding skills. The typical DevOps roles turned out to be these:

Automated Build & Release

Though automated nightly builds and smoke tests have been done even in a classic software development environment, such efforts were custom and scripted. Availability of automation platforms such as Hudson/Jenkins standardized such processes and the lead-time to deploy changes in production has been minimized as a result.

Configuration Management

This is a very generic term that earlier referred to source code control systems (CMS) but in the DevOps context, it refers to automation to define and create system components or roles. Though system components are largely software, in virtualized environments provisioning of hardware components such as virtual machines and storage volumes are very much in the scope.

A typical provisioning of a compute node for a system component or role can start with creation of virtual machine, setting up of user accounts and access privileges and installing baseline software bits specific to that role.

Deployment Automation

Most of the time, deployment automation is tied to configuration management or build & release infrastructure. While configuration management takes care of the baseline setup required for a system component, deployment automation addresses automated processes in getting the application software releases and patches installed on various types of compute nodes regularly. For example, Jenkins well integrated with a CMDB system can be used to provision baseline compute nodes for a system component, and the same infra can be used to push code incrementally to same compute nodes as part of the Continuous Integration (CI) process.

Monitoring

The last thing the providers of SasS and web consumer apps want to have is get notified of production issues by client users. The SaaS providers would loose credibility and web portals ad revenue if features will not work as intended. Even though highly reliable monitoring systems are available, it is impossible to catch all the issues using out-of-the-box features of such products. Extending the features based on domain knowledge of application is the key to get notified of potential issues before customers find it, and that requires broad set of skills mainly scripting and the know-how to consume wide-range of native and REST APIs provided by the third-party tools used and the application being monitored.

Operational Intelligence

A well instrumented software system can leave tons of information about its health and performance, and aggregating such info for troubleshooting and reporting could be a daunting task. Besides gathering info for management reporting, insights into the working of the system could also help to improve performance and fine-tune operability which would ultimately contribute to the increased availability of systems.

I don’t attempt to define DevOps in a very long sentence here deliberately as such attempts are awkward and would leave out few things always, as it is still an evolving field. Generally, a DevOps engineer will work in one or more areas discussed above. The keyword is “automation” which helps to scale up the production operations for delivering high quality SaaS offerings, consumer web apps and backend of mobile apps to large number of users.