DevOps is a term that has been used quite often recently. For someone, DevOps is a job title, but, in fact, DevOps is primarily a methodology that integrates development (Dev) and operations (IT Operations) and helps automate and improve their work.

Over time, engineers who are involved in implementation and know how to implement DevOps and practice DevOps methodologies have become a separate category that has appeared on job search sites and thematic IT portals.

DevOps can be approached from various classic areas of engineering: developers, testers, and system engineers (administrators, operation). At Microdevops, we approached DevOps precisely from the direction of system administration.

We expanded the scope of our influence, responsibility and technologies from pure Linux system administration due to the widespread introduction of automation, the use of Infrastructure as Code, influence on the Software Development Lifecycle of clients using GitLab-type systems, deployment pipelines, implementation of new services and communication methods.

Our refined knowledge, experience in reusable code, skills, shared systems used by our clients are what we call Microdevops Company.

Usually, companies or projects start looking for DevOps help in a situation where, on the one hand, they have a product, such as the code and content of the site, programmers who develop it, but, on the other hand, there is a certain mess or ambiguities in matters of deployment organization of this code, site operation under load, cost optimization and infrastructure security.

Very often people come to DevOps after a negative experience that was obtained without using DevOps practices: unexpected infrastructure costs, site hacking, data loss, conflicts in the code base. Unfortunately, before receiving such an unpleasant experience, it is often unclear why complicate simple approaches and learn new methodologies.

Such a situation is the best moment to turn to Microdevops.

In addition to using negative experiences, you can simply assess the current state of maturity of your project in terms of DevOps using, for example, the DORA methodology (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/using-the-four-keys-to-measure-your-devops-performance).

Among the symptoms that signal that you will need to look for DevOps in the near future are the following: your devs go to production servers on their own, no Infrastructure as Code, no monitoring, no documentation, no pipelines that run after a change in the code and check and deploy the code, there is no division into roles in the software development cycle as such.

After implementing DevOps methodologies, the project can and should expect:

• Increasing the level of infrastructure and data security.
• Easier to implement, more frequent and more controlled project code deployments.
• Fewer errors in the project.
• The possibility of resuming the work of the project after a disaster.
• Availability of monitoring, metrics, backups of project data.
• Stability of project operation under high load.

But there is also a warning from our side: you should not consider DevOps as a silver bullet that can instantly solve all the problems of your project. Often, project owners expect that having hired DevOps engineers themselves, or their employees, they will not have to do anything else for building DevOps. But it does not work like this.

DevOps, as a methodology, affects many processes related to the development and operation of projects, DevOps engineers help implement devops, improve processes, but at the same time, other participants in these processes must learn and change their approaches.

Also, processes often become more complex and slower. This is the price to be paid for additional safety, reliability, predictability and other things.

By contacting the company Microdevops for DevOps implementation, implementing our solutions, practices and code, using the experience of our engineers, projects can raise the level of implementation of DevOps technologies, raise the level of their evaluation, including to Elite according to DORA metrics 🙂

We have the necessary experience to develop a devops implementation plan, first of all, in the context of infrastructure operation, but also in improving the software development cycle as a whole, we have something to offer you.