DevOps for non technical people
Simone Dall'Angelo
Manages complexity, innovation and technologies for businesses | Executive Advisor @ Twig | Adjunct Professor in two masters @ Poli.DESIGN | Guest lecturer @ Scuola del Design - PoliMI | Coord. Area Innovazione @ A.P.I.
DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). DevOps aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.
Developers are the people that write code that is run on servers managed by another team, operations. But who is responsible when something breaks and when the problem is in the grey area between development and operations?
In this scenario, DevOp became a new job title that identifies a person (or team) with development knowledge but also has competencies at the operational level.
Avoiding (or at least reducing) problems between devs and ops enabled what is called "Continuous software delivery", which means that new code revisions can be put online faster and sometimes in an automated way.
Thanks to this, web services (for example) can deliver multiple changes as fast as they are finished by the development team, reducing the risk of having problems once deployed and, finally, making your users happier.
DevOps can be overkill in some contexts, but if you are responsible for a SaaS - Software As A Service - or any similar online platform, you should dig into it!
As usual, this is a "quick and dirty" explanation; DevOps is a huge topic! (of which I'm passionate about)
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This series of articles is dedicated to managers who are not technical but need a quick introduction to technical topics from various subjects to be more aware in their work.