DevOps Intro

This is a guest post by my dear friend – A DevOps (yes, they are friendly). Enjoy!

Hi everyone there over the internet! This is my very first post online, so I’m excited for the exposure I get here.
Let me start with a short story…

Once upon a time

Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away, there was a small city named Shinar.
There were people who were determined to make the best program ever made, a program that challenged the holy creation. G’d, observing the city, confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other.
For those who got some interest with ancient history, might find this story a bit familiar with the story of the Tower of Babel.

Now you’re probably asking yourself why I’m still reading this. You were guaranteed a post about technology, or awesome recipes for amazing Argentinian food, but if you’re willing to bear with me just for a little more, you’ll see where I’m heading.

Back to the future

If we’ll go fast forward to nowadays, or to be more accurate about 10 years ago, there were 2 main tribes: 

• Software developers, which all of their hopes and intentions, were to make the world a better place (or just being able to manufacture and release the best of their effort in their programs).
• IT Operators, mainly referred as SysAdmins, stereotyped to be living down the basement, with a bottle of beer in their hands, just trying to pass another day without annoying phone calls from customers to support, among them some irritable developers who comes with the most odd demands speaking language only they know.

This era took a while (quite a long time actually), until some developers got tired of this endless frustration, whenever they just wanted to update their server side application, or just happened to get their app crashed because of lack of memory.

“That’s it, we must stop it today, NOW !!!“

These fearless explorers decided to push themselves to the edge, and took the risk of going to the other side, all the way to the basement (if you’ll allow me to keep being prejudicial), getting face to face with those arrogant IT guys.

Get to know your neighbors

Before I continue, I would like to pause for just one more moment, and share with you this link of BOFH comics: http://bofh.bjash.com/bofh/bofh1.html 

You’re more than welcome to go on tracking for more episodes, but I assume you’ll get the idea after this chapter.
For those who love the genre, I highly recommend “The IT Crowd” series. As a former IT guy, I couldn’t hold myself and just went laughing all the series long. Now let’s go back to where we stopped from.

The big elephant in the room

It was known for all, that there is a big gap between how software developers and operators approached they daily work – Developers needed to design their code, optimize its performance, fix their bugs or adding many more features, while operators needed to make sure their infrastructure is stable, reliable, and from time to time putting out fires when a server crashes, or someone was (unintendedly) scanning every open port in the whole organization.

Their main problem was communication. Not speaking about TCP/IP here, but human communication. They were 2 different species speaking 2 different languages.

Thanks to our brave explorers, our ship has started to shift, one step at a time.

Developers started to understand, they needed someone that could understand their needs, and translate it into IT demands, such as resource allocation, network bandwidth, scale, etc.
On the other side, operators understood that setting up a server, without knowing anything about the application they were hosting, might cause issues and upcoming failures, which could be prevented in early stages.

This is how DevOps was started. 

Then principles like CI/CD started to take a shape, technologies such as Docker and NoSQL solutions emerged, and the world indeed became a better place and all the tribes have found themselves collaborating all together!

THE END!
(Well, we’ve just getting started 🙂 )

On future posts, I will try to answer questions like, 

• How come I’ve never heard of DevOps before?
• How can I get to know it further?
• Where do I start to study it? or how can I become a DevOps engineer?
• What DevOps guy is doing during daytime? (I’ll spare you what I’m doing with the rest of it 😛 )
• For which study cases DevOps is relevant ?
• What is DevOps? a culture? a profession? or maybe a mix of both ?

And for the greatest question of all, What is the meaning of life???

I don’t think that my answer for that question will keep you satisfied, but for sure I could tell that DevOps means a lot for the life of a single and even many groups of developers, as much as for operators.