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Kris Buytaert is a long time Linux and Open Source Consultant. He's one of instigators of the devops movement, currently working for Inuits He is frequently speaking at, or organizing different international conferences and has written about the same subjects in different Books, Papers and Articles He spends most of his time working on bridging the gap between developers and operations with a strong focus on High Availability, Scalability , Virtualisation and Large Infrastructure Management projects hence trying to build infrastructures that can survive the 10th floor test, better known today as the cloud while actively promoting the devops idea ! Kris is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 26 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website. View Full User Profile

DevOps: What it is, and what it is not

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I`m parsing the responses of the Deploying Drupal survey I started a couple of months ago (more on that later)


One of the questions in the survey is "What is devops" , apparently when you ask a zillion people (ok ok, just a large bunch of Tweeps..), you get a large amount of different answers ranging from totally wrong to spot on.

So let's go over them and see what we can learn from them ..

The most Wrong definition one can give is probably :

  • A buzzword

I think we've long passed the buzzword phase, definitely since it's not new, it's a new term we put to an existing practice. A new term that gives a lot of people that were already doing devops , a common word to dicuss about it. Also lots of people still seem to think that devops is a specific role, a job description , that it points to a specific group of people doing a certain job, it's not . Yes you'll see a lot of organisations looing for devops people, and giving them a devops job title. But it's kinda hard to be the only one doing devops in an organisation.

I described one of my current roles as Devops Kickstarter, it pretty much describes what I`m doing and it does contain devops :)

But devops also isn't

  • The connection between operations and development.
  • people that keep it running
  • crazy little fellows who find beauty in black/white letters( aka code) rather than a view like that of Taj in a full moon light.
  • the combination of developer and operations into one overall functionality
  • The perfect mixture between a developer and a system engineer. Someone who can optimize and simplify certain flows that are required by developers and system engineers, but sometimes are just outside of the scope for both of them.
  • Proxy between developer and management
  • The people in charge of the build/release cycle and planning.
  • A creature, made from 8-bit cells, with the knowledge of a seasoned developer, the skillset of a trained systems engineer and the perseverence of a true hacker.
  • The people filling the gap between the developer world and the sysadmin world. They understand dev. issues and system issues as well. They use tools from both world to solve them.


  • Developers looking at the operations of the company and how we can save the company time and money

And it's definitely not

  • Someone who mixes both a sysop and dev duties
  • developers who know how to deploy and manage sites, including content and configuration.
  • I believe there's a thin line line between Ops and Devs where we need to do parts of each others jobs (or at least try) to reach our common goal..
  • A developer that creates and maintains environments tools to help other developers be more successful in building and releasing new products
  • Developers who also do IT operations, or visa versa.
  • Software developers that support development teams and assist with infrastructure systems

So no, developers that take on systems roles next to their own role and want to go for NoOps isn't feasable at all really want collaboration, you want people with different skillsets that (try to) understand eachoter and (try to) work together towards a common goal.

Devops is also not just infrastructure as code

  • Writing software to manage operations
  • system administrators with a development culture.
  • Bring code management to operations, automating system admin tasks.
  • The melding of the art of Systems Administration and the skill of development with a focus on automation. A side effect of devops is the tearing down of the virtual wall that has existed between SA's and developers.
  • Infrastructure as code.
  • Applying some of the development worlds techniques (eg source control, builds, testing etc) to the operations world.
  • Code for infrastructure

Sure infastructure as code is a big part of the Automation part listed in CAMS, but just because you are doing puppet/chef doesn't mean you are doing devops.
Devops is also not just continous delivery

  • A way to let operations deploy sites in regular intervals to enable developers to interact on the systems earlier and make deployments easier.
  • Devops is the process of how you go from development to release.

Obviously lots of people doing devops also often try to achieve Continuous delivery, but just like Infrastructure as Code it devops is not limited to that :)

But I guess the truth is somewhere in the definitions below ...

  • That sweet spot between "operating system" or platform stack and the application layer. It is wanting sys admins who are willing to go beyond the normal package installers, and developers who know how to make their platform hum with their application.
  • Breaking the wall between dev and ops in the same way agile breaks the wall between business and dev e.g. coming to terms with changing requirements, iterative cycles
  • Not being an arsehole!
  • Sysadmin best-practise, using configuration as code, and facilitating communication between sysadmins and developers, with each understanding and participating in the activities of the other.
  • Devops is both the process of developers and system operators working closer together, as well as people who know (or who have worked in) both development and system operations.
  • Culture collaboration, tool-chains
  • Removing barriers to communication and efficiency through shared vocabulary, ideals, and business objectives to to deliver value.
  • A set of principles and good practices to improve the interactions between Operations and Development.
  • Collaboration between developers and sysadmins to work towards more reliable platforms
  • Building a bridge between development and operations
  • The systematic process of building, deploying, managing, and using an application or group of applications such as a drupal site.
  • Devops is collaboration and Integration between Software Development and System Administration.
  • Devops is an emerging set of principles, methods and practices for communication, collaboration and integration between software development (application/software engineering) and IT operations (systems administration/infrastructure) professionals.[1] It has developed in response to the emerging understanding of the interdependence and importance of both the development and operations disciplines in meeting an organization's goal of rapidly producing software products and services.
  • bringing together technology (development) & content (management) closer together
  • Making developers and admins understand each other.
  • Communication between developers and systems folk.
  • a cultural movement to improve agility between dev and ops
  • The cultural extension of agile to bring operations into development teams.
  • Tight collaboration of developers, operations team (sys admins) and QA-team.

But I can only conclude that there is a huge amount of evangelisation that still needs to be done, Lots of people still don't understand what devops is , or have a totally different view on it.

A number of technology conferences are and have taken up devops as a part of their conference program, inviting experienced people from outside of their focus field to talk about how they improve the quality of life !

There is still a large number of devops related problems to solve, so that's what I`ll be doing in 2012.


Published at DZone with permission of Kris Buytaert, author and DZone MVB.
