What is DevOps and what tasks a DevOps engineer does
The term DevOps (Development Operations, or operations within the
A rich arsenal of practices brings DevOps closer to otherspopular in the IT sphere using the Agile method. It is an iterative design approach that allows you to adapt to changing requirements. Accordingly, the DevOps specialist tries to make the product better, and the business processes more predictable and more transparent. It also improves business metrics, such as shortening Time-to-Market. This is the length of time from the start of product development to its market launch. Knowledge of the factors that stretch the time to create software and a systems approach allow the DevOps engineer to make production continuous and fast. To make it clearer, you can draw an analogy with a conveyor belt for assembling cars. All parts are designed in advance so that they fit perfectly together during assembly. Engineers who develop an engine think about how it works in conjunction with the wheels, the braking system, and so on. DevOps does the same: takes responsibility for more of the product than the developer does, makes sure all teams collaborate.
Pink Pony World: Race for Fashion Philosophy
However, not all companies need DevOps. For example, in teams without pre-existing IT departments that are not involved in the production of a digital product, the DevOps philosophy does not apply at all. These areas include companies whose profit does not directly depend on how satisfied customers are with the IT product with which they interact. In addition, it is often not suitable for small businesses. The methodology requires changes in many established business processes and even corporate culture. Small companies may simply not tolerate such changes in terms of project economics.
The fashionable disease of digital transformation is oftenconcerns the heads of such companies. In pursuit of endless optimization, they forget about other factors that affect the business. As a result, companies lose money, efficiency, and, in the worst case, business processes that have been built over the years. IT giants, banks, large trade and industrial events are another matter. For them, DevOps can be very beneficial. Thus, according to the annual report of Alfa-Bank for 2017, the introduction of the methodology allowed us to accelerate the development and implementation by 60 times.
Stakhanovite-mnogostanochnik instead of a workshop
Of course, such extensive functionality is hardto be done by one employee, so ideally a whole cross-functional team is involved in DevOps. It includes specialists who fill the roles of process and product managers, infrastructure code developer, engineer, and many other roles. However, in Russian practice, a DevOps specialist can often become a fashionable way to save money on product creation. Typically, this situation occurs after the top manager of the company decides that the time has come for digital transformation. The company urgently recruits new specialists or expands the list of responsibilities of existing developers and system administrators. As a result, recruiting services do not create vacancies for DevOps engineers, but for multi-station employees.
Such an employee can be obliged individuallyconfigure servers, lay cabling systems, and then track errors, configure databases and project hosting, and so on. This example is extreme, but real. As a result, employees quickly burn out, and the implementation of the methodology in the company's work fails. Treating a DevOps specialist as a magician who can simultaneously handle a large number of tasks, coupled with monitoring the operation of the entire system, will not bring profit to the business.
Another common problem is related todividing the team into two groups that cannot get along with each other. Imagine that an IT company has a DevOps department, which is allowed to change the usual work procedures. However, these rules remain binding on other developers. Of course, in this case there is no need to talk about cooperation and “seamlessness” of work. The two teams start to clash and productivity drops.
A barrel of powder in the hold: DevOps isn't just skills
One of the tasks of the DevOps department is to establishcommunication between different IT specialists of the company. DevOps engineers should not only implement technologies and debug processes, but also immerse the development team in the course of business - share responsibilities, help increase competencies. Nevertheless, such specialists often deal with purely technical tasks, usually due to the banal lack of time, both for them and those whose competencies need to be increased.
As a result, due to the fact that the introduced fashionableEveryone uses technologies, and knowledge and skills are concentrated within one department, problem situations arise, including catastrophic ones. New solutions created by DevOps engineers, without the coordinated work of different departments, can bring as many problems as they should have solved initially, which does not mean that DevOps specialists should create a corporate culture from scratch, as the domestic ones seem to often think. leaders. The unity of the digital production pipeline and the encouragement of the transfer of new skills and communication must come from the leaders of the company. Without this, even the DevOps team will develop poorly and will not share knowledge with the team.
Neither DevOps outsourcing norconsulting with a specialist from outside. In the first case, the external team is guided not by the needs of the client company, but by the standard set of technologies that are quoted on the market. For the client, this is a lottery: outsourced employees use a vague understanding of DevOps in the market. As a result, business processes become more and more complex, but this does not bring any benefits to the business. Often companies themselves encourage this approach - for example, asking them not to change their development processes. It is clear that this contradicts the very concept of DevOps.
Long, expensive, problematic: harsh DevOps in Russian
Instead of applying the DevOps philosophy toto all business processes, domestic companies often prefer working on tools that will not affect the speed of work. One of the results, for example, is the "brick wall" - Operations, that is, the team of system administrators, remains in isolation, and the developers simply throw applications at them. Of course, the toolbox is still improving as a result. However, fundamental changes are not taking place, transparency is not increasing, and IT team collaboration is not improving.
Another snag that managers stumble upon when implementing DevOps is the lack of enterprise knowledge bases.According to a 2019 DORA report, teams that used internal sources of company information were 1.73 times more effective than others.This problem again boils down to the closed culture of many Russian companies, in which the team does not exchange knowledge.Because of this secrecy, companies begin to accumulate technical debt, tools become obsolete, artifacts are not deleted, and documentation is not updated.
The objective need of business for the stability of production, and therefore profits, coupled with an outdated technology base and technical debt, lead toDevOps failure.
All this often leads to the fact that, after long torment, new solutions offered by the DevOps team are simply thrown away, and the processes are “rolled back”.
Each company has its own path of digital transformation. In most cases, it really changes how your code is developed and deployed for the better. This means that DevOps still exists in Russia: every month a lot of vacancies related to this methodology appear on the market. Another thing is that there are different definitions of the specialty and practical tasks behind them. However, companies should stop chasing ghostly ideal IT systems and be critical of adopting a trendy but not necessarily profitable philosophy, prioritizing their own needs.
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