🧠Knowledge Series #10 - DevOps Explained
Terminology worth knowing, insights from Slack and LinkedIn, how AI might transform the future of DevOps
🔒The Knowledge Series is a series of easy to read guides designed to help you plug the gaps in your tech knowledge so that you feel more confident when chatting to colleagues. Clearly explained in plain English. One topic at a time.
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Hi product people 👋,
The consequences of a poor DevOps set up can be serious for your product: failed releases, the introduction of bugs, bad engineering practices and poor morale. But unlike topics like APIs or SQL, DevOps is a little different since it’s a combination of multiple disciplines.
In this edition of the Knowledge Series we’ll attempt to unpack some of the most important bits worth knowing about DevOps so that the next time you have a conversation with your DevOps engineer you’ll be able to understand - and contribute - in a more informed way.
Coming up:
What is DevOps?
What are the goals of DevOps?
Continuous integration and continuous deployment explained
Case studies: how leading companies like Slack and LinkedIn do DevOps
The role of AI in DevOps - how AI could boost your DevOps processes
Tools and terminology worth knowing about
What is DevOps?
I remember being sat in a meeting in my first role in tech many years ago as the engineering teams discussed the intricacies of setting up a continuous deployment pipeline to automate the release process. Since I had transitioned into tech from a legal background, I really didn’t have much of an idea of what the team was talking about. And then I thought to myself: do I even need to know what they’re talking about?
And that’s the tricky thing about something like DevOps; many of the concepts are so abstract and specific to the role of DevOps that for the most part, they’re not worth delving too deeply into. But, since the implications of a poor DevOps setup can be so serious, it is worth having a high level understanding of some of the key aspects.
DevOps is typically defined as a combination of 3 distinct disciplines: development, QA and operations. DevOps could be best thought of as a culture and not necessarily a single skillset.
The goals of DevOps
The primary goal of DevOps is to ensure that processes and operations are streamlined effectively so that engineering teams focus less on their tools and processes and more on building elegant solutions to important problems.
The goals of DevOps include:
Automating code testing
Automating workflows
Automating infrastructure
Automating everything