DevOps has always been a pretty vague word to me. I’ve never been able to fully understand what it is and why more and more tech companies are using this “concept”.
After digging through some texts and blogs I now have a clearer view on what it actually is. Though I should point out its not easy to explain, because it tries to tie philosophy and how to think about a product and actually implementing a solution to that. And we all know philosophy and practice do not particularly have a good relationship.
DevOps is a combination of two words, “Dev”, which as you guessed it, means development. And it covers all areas of development, not of code, but the whole product. The second part, “Ops”, means operations, and it encompasses all areas of operations and automation and all those catchy words that can be boiled down to “make the making of your product better”.
So, DevOps is first and foremost a way of thinking about a product and how it should be developed to have the best results. Not just in terms of code and unit testing, but in terms of the whole product. It means that we should integrate the testing and quality process of the product with the actual work done by coders. It is a child from Agile development, but where as Agile thinks primarily on the code and how it should be done for a effective process, DevOps thinks of your whole product, your service and how it should be done.
Now, to integrate DevOps into your product is not easy. I believe that the bigger your teams is (QA testers, developers, PMs, etc), the harder it is to fully integrate DevOps. But you can start by implementing certain tools. There are many out there, and probably all will work, but you need to know what DevOps even is and fully understand it in order to get all the advantages it offers. Some of the practices of DevOps include automation, continous delivery, which means maybe having scheduled app builds. Monitoring of your systems, maybe through analytics software, the “health” of your product, and so on.
The sky is yours in DevOps, but only if you know how to reach it.
Another Mobile Developer 