DevOps: the art of taming choas. Conducting an orchestra of code, infrastructure, security, and operations procedures. Turning chaos into order. Keep calm and automate on
Effective DevOps can transfer companies, by providing the keys the unlock potential in every engineering and product team
When I first started doing large web development. I worked on a classic ASP site for Waitrose. It was the first shopping site used by a supermarket retailer where you could order your shopping and have it delivered to work. Back then, putting something live was done by “requesting access” to the servers, where the network or system administrators would open the network for my access for a few hours and I would manually copy all the files over to the 2 servers and test it.
This was a very manual process, and it was very easy to make a mistake. Even back then, I used tools like rsync to try and automate this as much as possible.
DevOps as a concept was introduced in 2009 by Patrick Debois and Andrew Shafer at the Agile conference. They looked to build a set of relationships principles between development and operations teams to improve the speed and quality of software delivery. It’s more of a movement and today eco-system of tools and practices that help anyone deliver software faster and more reliably.
SRE, or Site Reliability Engineering, was pioneered by Google in the early 2000s to address operational challenges in managing large-scale, complex systems. Google developed SRE practices and tools, such as the Borg cluster management system and the Monarch monitoring system, to improve the reliability and efficiency of their services.
A really good book on the subject is here Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
Platform Engineering is a more recent concept, building on the foundation of SRE engineering. The precise origins of Platform Engineering are less clear, but it is generally understood to be an extension of the DevOps and SRE practices, with a focus on delivering a comprehensive platform for product development that supports the entire business perspective.
It’s worth noting that while these concepts emerged at different times. They are all related to the broader trend of improving collaboration, automation, and efficiency in software development and operations.