How DevOps works at scale!
We all have been hearing about the what and why of DevOps for more than a decade now but I rarely come across how DevOps works at scale. This article provides some insights on how DevOps is implemented at scale from my experience.
I've been doing Infrastructure(I) and technical Operations(O) for over 15 years now, and the IT industry has seen several changes during this time. Please refer to my previous article on changing needs of our industry concerning technical operations.
After my 3 year stint with Truecaller as Senior Infrastructure Engineer, I joined iZettle (which has been acquired by PayPal and is now called Zettle By PayPal) as DevOps Engineer. Here, I learned various aspects of DevOps, especially the how of DevOps.
Infrastructure as Code (Iac): What I believed as Iac (Puppet/Ansible) was not what it actually is. There is no more click-click-done on the AWS console :) I've learned Terraform and best practices around it. (shameless advertising: I also did certification on Hashicorp: Terraform Associate). To reinforce the distinction between Ansible and Terraform, the former is a configuration management tool, and the latter is an infrastructure provisioning tool. Both are considered as IaC. They complement each other.
How to succeed in DevOps: As we all know, DevOps is more of a cultural shift rather than the tools we adopt and one question that has been haunting me for a long time was, how can one succeed in a DevOps role. Should it require more of an Operations background or a Development background? In my opinion, if one wants to succeed in a DevOps role, one needs to have a strong Development background. It doesn't matter which programming language it is. It can be Javascript, Python or Golang. After Perl, I'm not embarrassed to say that I managed to learn Python, which is my go-to language now :) (I do/did a bit of Golang and PHP too).
Team: Now, coming to the most important aspect of DevOps implementation, i.e., team dynamics. My team consists of people from various countries and backgrounds and my suggestion to build a good rapport within the team is — just 1. Ask questions. Genuinely. Do not make judgements. If you don't ask, the answer is always NO. Rule number 2: Trust by default. You can't scale the team without trust.
And like any other stream, DevOps has been evolving for over a decade now and I think it has become mature now. In other words, the tools we use currently have become the new norm now. You are expected to know Git, Containers and its orchestration, CI/CD. However, I believe there is a lot more room for improvement in the areas of Observability and Chaos Engineering.
That said if you are curious about learning new stuff, like me, DevOps is the right choice as you get to learn the best of both worlds from Development and Operations!
If you like the article, please share/comment. Tack!
