What is DevOps? Infrastructure as Code
by Alpha01
The million dollar question it is, well not necessarily. In short DevOps is essentially the evolution of Information Technology Operations to the 21st century. This short paper that O’Reilly bundled as a free eBook, does an awesome job describing operations from its early place in computing were essentially systems administrators were developers and up till now. Were now if you’re going to do operations reliably, you need to effectively make it reproducible in a pragmatic manner, hence the popularity of tools like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, so on a so forth. This means organization’s core infrastructure moves into “code”, and those responsible for managing that infrastructure (eg, Systems Administrators, IT administrators, etc..) , will have adapt to this evolution. In comes DevOps in to the scene, which is cooperation and collaboration between the operations team that manages the applications and the development team that creates the applications. A perfect example that this paper describes is how now in days, modern applications run in the “cloud” like Amazon Web Services. While this completely changes the concept of having a traditional physical server in your companies closet, or co-location, this doesn’t mean that operations goes away, it now means that it now becomes part of development.
The most important concept described by this paper, is that while operations changes, the end outcome continues to be the same. An effect of this, is while even though there are more virtual/physical servers in an organizations more than ever before, traditional IT jobs become lesser as now their functions become part of development. This somewhat reminds me when I was in school and having fellow students already working in the IT field as MS-Exchange administrators, and now those types of jobs/responsibilities/functions are becoming lesser and lesser due to Google Apps and low cost MS-Exchange managed services. Were they able to adapt to this operations change?
Rating: 5/5
What is DevOps?: Infrastructure as Code
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