Meet the programmer who automates everything: The DevOps guy
This article is for someone new to programming or interested in starting a career in DevOps.
Table of contents
Happy programmers' day🤓!
Heads up. I am a front-end software engineer. I have little to almost no experience in DevOps. This year was my first time working in a team with a DevOps engineer. Today, I thought it would be great to share what I have so far learned about DevOps.
If you already know who a DevOps engineer is, you can bounce along now. I don’t want to bore anyone. Oh, leave a thumbs up before you go😝.
This article is for someone new to programming or interested in starting a career in DevOps.
What is DevOps?
An IBM article defines DevOps as,
A set of practices that aims to shorten the software development lifecycle and speed the delivery of higher-quality software by breaking down the silos and combining and automating the work of software development teams and IT operations teams.
Silos simply means that development teams work within their “departments”. Teams that work in silos usually use the waterfall software development model. Some of the problems with this approach include delayed feedback cycles, slow development because each step needs to be completed before moving on to another, and less collaboration among teams because of the departmental mindset.
To tackle these issues, DevOps combines agility, automation, and collaboration, which creates cross-functionality across teams.
What does a DevOps engineer do?
When you deploy your application to the world, you want to be able to add new feature requests and optimize the already published code or the production application. A DevOps engineer implements mechanisms that allow continuous deployment of recent changes to the deployed application.
How about configuring a bundling tool in your front-end application? If you have used a bundling tool like Webpack, you most likely found it daunting to learn or use, especially for a beginner. Luckily, if you are working on a team with a DevOps engineer, they can take care of those kinds of configurations so you can focus on your primary tasks ie UI implementation, database design, etc.
You may accidentally push a secret like an API key to the deployed codebase. This can be hazardous if a hacker landed on them. A DevOps engineer implements mechanisms that catch any unprotected secrets before changes are pushed to production.
Applications utilize system resources like Memory and CPU. The DevOps engineer sets up tools to monitor the application performance allowing the team to have full visibility into how these resources are utilized. When you have these kinds of tools set up, you can make decisions that will allow you to cut down costs.
I hope you have learned something new about DevOps. I have shared some reading resources to help you learn more about DevOps.
Thank you for reading till the end. Like, leave a comment, and share with your network if you found this piece helpful.