What is DevOps? AWS defines DevOps as “the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.”[i] So in essence DevOps is not only about the tools and practices it is about the mindset also. I have worked as a DevOps Engineer for about 7 years for three different organizations and DevOps was defined very differently at each organization. At the first organization I was more of a service engineer attempting to move our traditional on-prem infrastructure to the cloud. At the second organization I was an automation engineer, writing scripts to automate workflows for deployments. At the third organization I was an actual DevOps Engineer, this meant that I was directly working with the development team from when a feature was designed to when it was deployed to the customer on the production environment. I have come to realize that often as is the case in the Software industry when a new technology or methodology is introduced, the majority rush to implement a version of it in their own product or team. This rush often forgoes any cost benefit analysis and leads to issues. For example, at every organization where I worked as a DevOps Engineer, we were not doing pure DevOps, where we should have rearchitected our application to take advantage of CI/CD. Instead, we were taking legacy applications and wrapping them in some automation scripts and calling it a day. I assume it is because if we had done actual cost benefit analysis, it would have cost too much to rearchitect the application. But I think for DevOps to be successfully implemented, it requires the whole organization to change, and I think that is too much for a lot of companies and so what is left is this half and half implementation.
[i] https://aws.amazon.com/devops/what-is-devops/
