eli5 what is DevOps ?

Question

What exactly is DevOps and what’s the learning roadmap.

In: 25

Answer 1

It used to be a standard operating model at software companies that the people who actually *write* the software, write new features, fix bugs, etc. and the people who actually *run* the software as a service once its done, are separate people on separate teams.

Once the software was “done,” and launched as a live service, it was a different team who kept that software running, got paged and woken up if there was an issue, had to be “on-call” to fix outages, run the actual data centers and the servers in them, etc.

One problem with this model is that writing software is a lot sexier than running software. No one wants to be “on-call” and woken up at 3am because the data center had a power outage, or the database exploded, or the network had a routing problem. It’s not a fun job.

This often led to a two-tiered system of highly paid software developers who wrote software, and less highly-paid and second-class software/IT people who actually had to deal with that software when it crashed or otherwise had an operational problem.

It also led to crappier software. When the people who write software don’t have to deal with the woken-up-at-3am consequences of it crashing, then those people tend to write less stable software with more bugs over time. After all, it’s not their jobs to keep it going.

So in the last 10-15 years, there’s been a turn towards unifying writing (“developing” / “dev”) software and operating (“ops”) into “DevOps.” Basically, all it means is that the same people who write something are also the ones that keep it running in a live environment.

These days it’s getting increasingly rare to find a company with a dedicated “operations” team. Most companies, especially big tech companies, expect their developers to also be on-call and fix any problems in production that the code they wrote might create.

This means jobs that “developers” usually didn’t have to worry about because other teams handled them: network rules, storage, redundancy, testing, on-call, build and deploy, etc. are now considered to be part of the job for a lot of software development roles.