DevOps is more than just about developers

There. It has been said. Take a moment, and think about it.

There is a push in the community to talk about Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), and tying this all to the DevOps movement. About what practices are used to get code to market the fastest, and with minimal amount of code defects. And, I will admit, that I agree wholeheartedly, that CI/CD or some sort of pipeline is important to allow software development teams to move fast and innovate. Or, to just roll out code without doing it every 6 months. I would almost argue that CI/CD is more akin to Agile and Scrum methodologies than it is to DevOps.

When it comes to DevOps, there is a side to this equation that is not commonly being addressed, Infrastructure and Operations.

Infrastructure Ops

InfraOps, whatever you want to call it. This is the glue that holds together all the services that applications run on top of. It is the items that people take for granted when it works, but cry foul when things go down. When servers go down at 2 a.m. InfraOps is what keeps the lights on.

It is easy to dismiss this side of the DevOps house. But, lets quickly discuss all the items that we need to cover here.

Infrastructure Operations List

• System Deployment
  • Operating systems
  • Patching
• Virtualization (Docker, AWS, Azure)
• CMDB
• Monitoring
• Software Deployment
  • 3rd Part
  • In house
• Load Balancers
• Hardware Failover
• Disaster Recovery
• Caching Servers
• Database Systems
• Development Environments
• Backups

This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the items that must be handled for a solution to be properly deployed and supported. But, the idea is to bring to light the side of the DevOps world that is often overlooked. It does not matter how good your code is if you don’t have an infrastructure that will stay online and support your applications. Often this is an overlooked and under staffed area that needs more attention.

Automation is king

The only way to ensure that the Infrastructure is able to support ongoing systems, deployments, and updates is with automation. Every time that a machine is built by hand, a configuration file is manually changed, or updates are performed manually, you have introduced risk into your environment. Each of these interactions is potentially a slow down in the pipeline, or worse, a manual change that has never been documented.

There are a number of tools and processes wrapped around handling Infrastructure Automation: Chef, Ansible, cfEgine, Salt. The list goes on. In some places there people have rolled their own. It does not matter as much about the tool, as long as we are moving away from manual intervention to a more dynamic scalable infrastructure. These tools all require an in-depth knowledge of underlying systems as well as the ability to code. But the end goal is DevOps on the infrastructure as well as on the Development side of the house.

There are places where tools are lacking to help support of automation. While new SaaS Solutions are filling some of these gaps, if you need to run your monitoring system in house, many of the solutions that currently exist are not built around dynamic infrastructure and ephemeral machines. The tools need to catch up with the needs of the users. In the meantime, the back end DevOps guys write workarounds to handle situations like this.

Moving Forward

Moving forward, let us try and look at all aspects of DevOps, from development to application deployment, and from hardware to infrastructure and scaling design. There is still much work to be done, but we are moving in the correct direction.