Who makes a better DevOps engineer? What’s the outcome of developer vs. sysadmin? This article will provide you with the answers to these questions and even more.
Before getting into details, let’s see what is the difference between a software developer and a system administrator?
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has been a trend for many years. While some standards are being defined today, we continue to hear about new methods or tools to improve and make our lives easier by automating our daily tasks as much as possible.
Fortunately or unfortunately, today, we have the choice between multiple automation tools like Ansible, Pulumi, Terraform, etc, each one having its own benefits and disadvantages. Thus, choosing the right tool is not the easiest part. It requires a team collaboration to identify, test, and define the right tool. This collaboration is the key to success, it is important to ensure the engagement of the other teams to the IaC project to properly automate the process of each team.
If you and your team are dealing with tools like Git or Subversion, you may need an administrative layer where you are able to manage user access and repositories in a comfortable way, because source control management systems (SCM) don’t bring this functionality out of the box.
Perhaps you are already familiar with popular management solutions like GitHub, GitBlit or GitLab. The main reason for their success is their huge functionality. And of course, if you plan to create your own build and deploy pipeline with an automation server like Jenkins you will need to host your own repository manager too.
In the tech world, DevOps is a word frequently tossed around to describe the blending of development and operations teams. It’s a melting pot where engineers work in tandem across the application lifecycle, revamping the typical « silo » framework. Adopting this model requires a necessary change of antiquated company culture to dismantle and reorganize the traditional structure, ultimately reducing operational inefficiencies. Once optimized, these DevOps teams produce benefits like increased speed and reliability, rapid delivery and scaling ability, and improved collaboration and security.
Typically, this philosophy is hailed as a superior organizational approach; however, Uri Zaidenwerg voices a different opinion in his article « Why DevOps Will Cease to Exist. » In his article, Uri, a DevOps engineer himself, begins by briefly summarizing what the path to becoming a DevOps engineer looks like. Following this career outline, he identifies what he sees as « signs of the end » for DevOps engineers before forecasting his prophecy.
The application development landscape has fundamentally changed in recent years. In a recent interview with Ambassador Labs, Mario Loria from CartaX said he believes this is still uncharted territory, particularly for developers in the cloud-native space. As he sees it, site reliability engineers (SREs) play a key role in guiding developers through the learning curve toward comprehensive self-service of the supporting platforms and ecosystem, and ultimately to service ownership. This requires a major shift in company and management culture, and developer (and SRE) mindset and tooling as well as insight to make the journey to full lifecycle ownership not just smoother and more transparent but also technically feasible.
The traditional monolith continues to exist in parallel with cloud-native application development. The operations side of the equation, according to Mario, understands that this has caused a big shift in deploying, releasing, and operating applications, and now the role of SREs is to help developers understand and own this shift. Developers know how to code, but building in the necessary understanding (and ownership) of the “ship” and “run” aspects of the lifecycle introduces a steep learning curve. For developers, this means taking on new responsibilities with the support of SREs.
With the advancement and growth in technology and the arrival of DevOps and Agile, the software testing industry is witnessing numerous changes. Software Testing has traversed a long path from manual testing to record-and-playback sophisticated testing tools, then to test automation, and now to codeless automated testing.
World Quality Report 2020–2021 states that not having advanced programming know-how and expertise is considered one of the critical challenges when applying automated testing to Agile projects. We could perhaps state that the development of codeless testing tools is a promising solution to the challenge.
The ‘ping’ command is used to troubleshoot and diagnose network connectivity issues. It is used to check whether the host is reachable. It’s available on all the Operating Systems. ‘ping’ reports the round-trip time for the messages sent from the source to the destination.
Fig: Ping Packets
Velocity in agile development measures the quantity of work a team can accomplish in a sprint. It can be measured in story points, hours or days. The higher the velocity of a team, the more features it delivers, the more value it brings to customers. Sprint velocity is a good measure in sprint project management to evaluate and estimate team productivity.
The measure of the velocity is based on multiple factors: the continuous integration (CI) process, the time to qualify the code changes, to test the regression, the security, the delivery, etc…
Announcing the DZone monthly community award winners for May 2021! The DZone monthly community awards celebrate our amazing developer and software professional creators and contributors worldwide!
From DZone Editor Samantha Ross: « Mir Ali (DZone profile) never fails to bring the fire and wisdom to his beautifully worded articles. His focus this May was on Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), but since he started only this past December, he’s shared his knowledge on everything from AI to DevOps. Both his published pieces this month I classed as phenomenally well-written, and I’d like to congratulate Mir on his growing DZone portfolio and engagement, having hit his 100k this month. Looking forward to what’s next! »
For many companies, getting products out the door faster is one of the main reasons to adopt DevOps. But speeding up software delivery is only one aspect of why companies should embrace an agile CI/CD approach. There are other things to take into consideration and, if you are a financial institution, the list can be even bigger.
I recently chatted with Ben Angell and Sanmat Jhanjhari of Nationwide Building Society as part of the virtual DevOps Enterprise Summit Europe. Ben leads the DevOps Engineering team and Sanmat is lead DevOps architect at the UK-based mutual financial institution, which is also the largest building society in the world.
