In 2009, the term DevOps was coined by Patrick Dubois at a conference in Belgium. The idea was simple – improve collaboration between development and IT operations in order to provide better quality and consistency of software releases. Now, prior to that period, the title that fit me the best was Build / Release Engineer. In 2003, while consulting for General Electric, I was offered a full-time position at GE as a Lead Software Integrator. GE created this role to be someone who took responsibility for the code once it landed in version control, until the destination – production. I was responsible for build, test, deploy, and release. Planning and Coding were handled by the development teams and Monitoring was managed by IT operations. Plan, Code, Build, Test, Deploy, Release, and Monitor – that’s what we call DevOps today and it’s all of these steps that are part of the infinity loop.
In 2011, after working as a Release Manager with JPMorgan Chase, it was time for me to move more towards my passion – Release Engineering. Release Engineering is the software engineering discipline around managing releases into production. With engineering, comes tools and processes. All of this ultimately led to a change in my title, from Release Engineering to DevOps. Now this debate has been raging for the better part of the last decade – is DevOps a title or is it more to do with the culture of an engineering organization?
DevOps is a mindset that should be “woven” into the Engineering Culture of an organization. The business, development teams, and IT Operations should communicate and collaborate with each other in unison. Now, if your organization doesn’t have an engineering culture, well then you need to build it. It would make sense, in those circumstances, to have a “team” that builds culture, automation, measurement, and collaboration into the organization’s soul. What I have seen is that these teams stick around for a long time. Why? Because tools change and when tools change, the processes around them change. People always change – and that trifecta of change will continue to keep DevOps teams in place for a long time.
If you would like to talk to me about DevOps practices, please send me a note at sagar@vnvdevops.com.
XebiaLabs Periodic Table – https://xebialabs.com/periodic-table-of-devops-tools/
DevOps Terminology – https://www.plutora.com/devops-at-scale/terminology-glossary
DataOps / DevSecOps – https://dzone.com/articles/dataops-leveraging-devsecops-principles-for-secure
LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/sagarkarma
Twitter – @sagarvnvdevops
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