Day 2

Today, I learned more about the responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer and the DevOps process.

It all starts with the application — at the top of the chain is the application. The goal of every software development approach is to deliver the said application to the customers or users, depending on the use case; Thus, a typical application release process starts with an idea for the application, and the idea is drawn out with its requirements put on paper/notes, the product is developed — coded, the application is tested; if it passes, it is deployed to a public server for use by end-users.

Before an application can be deployed, the source code is made executable, and the public server is configured: installing the application’s dependencies, the application is deployed, and then firewalls to allow required traffic is also configured.

This is great, but monitoring is necessary; to know if there are problems with the application (bugs that were not detected during testing), how your customers are also interacting with the application, and the response of the application when traffic is high. Improvements also would be made: increasing the features of your deployment infrastructures — servers — or even adding features to the application. These changes must be accessible to the users immediately after implementation. Versioning must be done for easy identification of deployments, rollbacks and disaster recovery planning.

These — idea, code, test, building/packaging, deployment, monitoring — form the cycle of continuous delivery; it is a continuous process since there will always be new improvements to be made, and these processes are for delivery to users.

Once again, DevOps is about making this process fast, with minimal errors/bugs (since continuous testing is carried out). As buttressed yesterday, DevOps lets two teams intersect to improve collaboration and make the release of the applications seamless; it also ensures that the entire process is more secure and automated.

While Developers are in charge of coding the application, the DevOps engineer needs and requires knowledge of the basic principles and fundamentals of the stacks that are used in developing the application; what git workflow they’re using, how the application has been configured to respond to other services and databases, the engineer is also required to understand basic concepts of automated testing.

One major DevOps technology that we’ll talk about much later is containerization. It is necessary for deployment purposes.

Understanding what goes into the release of an application is amazing! It is important to note that the DevOps Engineer is in charge of getting the developed, tested, and fixed application to your customers, continuously (CI/CD), seamlessly, and in an automated way.

Till next time (tomorrow), ciao.

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