IT Ops - Life Before and After DevOps

2 Min Read | October 07, 2014

We know that the new DevOps approach is changing the way software developers and operations interact and collaborate.

What does that mean for the job of an IT Operations Manager? Let’s look at a day in the life before and after moving to a DevOps approach for an operations guy. Let’s call him Bob...

Release Management

  • Life Before DevOps… Bob had to be involved in every release. Dev teams had scripts they wanted and engineers need VMs to be provisioned and/or configured.
  • Life After DevOps… VM provisioning and configurations are automated through config management recipes or scripts that are embedded with each code deployment, so Bob doesn’t get pulled into the tactical fire drills for releases.

Monitoring Production Apps

  • Life Before DevOps… Bob has multiple apps that are in production that he is responsible for once they go live. He is reactive to issues in the environment because they don’t appear on his radar before then.
  • Life After DevOps… Because ops participated early in the process and he’s tracking the app from dev stage, Bob has insight into the potential performance issues from the outset and has been able to mitigate many of them, working with the developers.

Scaling

  • Life Before DevOps… New servers are being added by engineering all of the time. He may or may not know when they are added, but he sure is responsible for the performance of the environments.
  • Life After DevOps… Automated scaling allows for new servers to be provisioned and configured. If he has a solution like Vistara, they’re automatically discovered and managed according to the rules he’s set, whether they are in dev, test or production.

While Bob’s day to day tasks have changed, he still needs the right tools to enable him to operate a dynamic infrastructure that supports dev, test and production environments and has to be managed with a service-centric view.

Vistara is a highly distributed SaaS application and our engineers have organized around a DevOps approach. Hear Vistara’s DevOps lead talk about what we learned in the transition and how we manage our highly distributed SaaS app eating our own dogfood.


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