About the role of a DevOps engineer on a project
Today, the quote “if you master information, you master the whole world” can be paraphrased as follows – “If you’re friends with information technologies, you master the whole world.” Digital transformation guarantees a company fast entry into the market, an increase in revenue, and attention from clients. That is why IT companies orient towards a DevOps culture. This is confirmed by the success of such brands as Kaiser Permanente, Starbucks, and Yahoo. To understand how DevOps services help businesses, we spoke with Andrey Avdeev, a DevOps engineer at Andersen.
Andrey came to DevOps from network technologies. He worked as a network engineer for a long time, until network equipment vendors began to implement APIs into devices. This made it possible to administer the hardware from the code level. From there, Andrey gradually came to DevOps.
— Some experts interpret DevOps as a culture, and others define this concept as a methodology. What is DevOps from a DevOps engineer’s point of view?
From an engineer’s point of view, two aspects can be noted here: technical and business. The technical paradigm implies a many-fold acceleration of all processes and continuous CI/CD updating in the software life cycle. All this happens fast and is unnoticeable to consumers. Having configured the process once, we can use it for a long time, both for development environments and app building.
Speaking about the business aspect, any improvement in terms of speed will always be a plus. This is a reduction in the time for releasing updates, implementing some important business functions, and other benefits. It all depends on the application and the company.
— Are DevOps and Agile different things or is DevOps impossible without Аgile?
Many heads, many minds. Agile itself is a business development methodology because it enables companies to quickly respond to market changes. DevOps, adhering to this methodology, can be flexible as well. They are related at some level of business understanding.
— At what stage of the software development life cycle is DevOps needed?
When developing products, we offer most of our customers a full cycle of DevOps support – from building pipelines to releasing the program into production. The market is rather flexible, which can influence changes in the application, functions, and so on. DevOps services, of course, are more needed at the stage of product development (be it a cloud or the creation of infrastructure or a data center) and at the stage of maintenance during release changes. But as for us, it is mostly full-cycle.
— What are the responsibilities of a DevOps engineer on a project? What skills should this specialist possess?
The main responsibility is the technical maintenance of the project, which includes many different parties and technologies (infrastructure design, network technologies, databases, clouds – anything). Moreover, they can be segmented for different vendors; databases have their gradation too.
A DevOps engineer is somewhat of a universal person – the more skills this specialist has, the better they understand how everything functions and the more efficiently they create the infrastructure. They know how the product should work, how to ensure fault tolerance, and so on.
A customer who comes with a create-me-a-product request may not know all the peculiarities of project implementation. A DevOps engineer asks the right questions and brings up these topics.
— Are there performance criteria by which a DevOps development company measures the success of its work?
We are guided by the roadmap and task planning built by the management and try to keep within the deadlines. Obviously, some things may require additional time for consideration. Technically, a DevOps specialist must address these issues in order to fix problems before release. From a DevOps perspective, the main criterion is when everything technically works as it should.
— What will happen to a project without DevOps?
Product release dates will be postponed for a very long time, which will affect the business and the application cost. After all, a DevOps specialist is a specialist who understands the product from the technical angle – how it will work and what is required for this.
