Hiring a DevOps engineer is a common practice at most IT companies. Having a DevOps developer in your team usually results in making releases more often, faster and better than competitors not implementing a DevOps strategy. Today hiring a DevOps engineer is also relevant for industries other than those from the IT world. Businesses from startups to large enterprises are increasingly thinking: Why not introduce DevOps?
Let’s remember the time in the 2000s when companies introduced their cloud computing offerings at a large scale. New services were put into the popular IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS categories. New kinds of storage and messaging technologies were promoted. Also, novel approaches were discussed, such as designing applications for horizontal scalability and eventual consistency.
Ask any software engineer about the best way to do something and they’ll likely tell you “it depends.” Every project and team works differently and has specific concerns, requirements, and opinions, adding complexity on top of the technical and operational complexity of software development. The challenge lies in managing the work and emergent complexity while staying abreast of industry best practices in a way that fits our teams’ particular processes and environments.
Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery or deployment (CD) cover the process of automatically merging, building, and testing code changes ready for release, and – in the case of continuous deployment – releasing those changes to users. If you’re developing software for others to use, you’ll need to go through some form of build and test process before you make your latest changes available.
Recently, I remembered a situation when I was in elementary school and visited a friend at his house. At some point, his mother wanted us to go to a neighbour and ask to borrow some eggs. We went a few houses down, opened the garden gate, entered through the door to the house, and arrived in the kitchen calling out for the person. But no one was at home, so we left and returned without eggs.