Origins and value of DevOps

- [Instructor] So what is the value of DevOps in the cloud? Well, first and foremost, it's about agility and your ability to compress the time it takes you to build software and bring it to market, either to solve the needs of a business or, in essence, build a product into itself. So for years we've had the Agile methodology, the ability to, in essence, work in an Agile way, which allows us to break down projects into a series of sprints. And this allows us to avoid some of the unproductivity because we're able to, in essence, make these things happen in small buckets of work. If you look at what DevOps is, it's really the automation of Agile. So what's the value of DEvOps in the cloud? Well, first and foremost, the agility aspect of it. 'Cause we are not leveraging waterfall anymore. We can leverage other technologies to move in different directions, to push the development of one feature function over another, to react to customer demands in a much more responsive way. Basically, it takes the limitations off of software development, allows us to go any number of ways, versus in the past, we had to stick to a predefined plan and we had to stick to a predefined design, and we had to get to a version release, 1.0, 1.2, 2.0, that would, in essence, track back to a plan and a design. Those restrictions have been lifted. It's much more cost-effective, and certainly DevOps in the cloud is much more cost-effective because we're not buying hardware and software. It's on demand out of the public cloud and allows us to, in essence, move in different directions very fast. We're able to automate testing, therefore you don't have to have people around to do that. We're able to automate security, tracking, the ability to do other kinds of stability testing, the ability to do integration, the ability to do continuous improvement. And that leads to the fact that we're able to build and deploy software in a much more cost efficient way. And then finally it increases quality. So at the end of the day, we're building things by continuously improving how we're going to be leveraging technology in a particular way to allow the quality to improve. And by doing that, by continuously looking at how we can better the tool set, better the chain, better the process, and better the efficiency and better the talent of people who are working on the technology, it allows quality to increase because we're always asking how we can do things better. So keep in mind we're moving from a traditional waterfall. It's been around for years. And if you think about it in building something, we build houses like this, we build cities like this. We have the analysis, we have the design, we have the implementation, we have the testing, and then it goes into operations or maintenance. And nothing wrong with this unto itself, it just has a tendency to be less efficient and not as cost-effective. At the end of the day, it forces the ability to deal with sequence. In other words, we have to do things in order. It creates dependencies, in other words, certain things have to occur before certain other things can occur. Has a tendency to slow developments 'cause ultimately we're not necessarily going to do things in a way that allows us to become more efficient because we're waiting for things to end before we start things. And then the business needs typically aren't met in a responsive way. So the ability to, in essence, align to the speed of business is going to be the value of DevOps going forward because there should not be latency with what the business wants with what the developers can provide. So we're moving to DevOps and a few things are changing. Number one, we don't have dependencies anymore. We're not waiting for another project to end before we can start. Typically things can be done at the same time or in parallel. We're not doing things in sequence. And we're getting to a state where automation is going to be king. And moving to 100% automation where, in essence, we're able to automate the testing, automate the deployment, automate the integration, automate the security checks, automate the compliance checks, all these sorts of things that are very complex and expensive processes that are put into the software development life cycle, we can automate with a DevOps tool chain. And the ultimate value is we're able to deal with businesses at the speed that they need the changes to the technology, changes to the software. So as the business tells us they need things to change, to, for example, acquire a company, to get a new product line out, things like that, they're not waiting for IT to step up to the plate and make the changes that they need. The changes can be made in a very short amount of time. So keep in mind that DevOps and cloud computing are going to be joined at the hip. Ultimately, there's an application focus and a cloud focus. We're dealing with Agile, we're dealing with DevOps, we're dealing with cloud service management and cloud service operations. So DevOps is systemic to every cloud project out there. Ultimately, if you're moving into cloud, you're not going to be able to leverage cloud effectively without a good DevOps process and a good DevOps tool chain. Hopefully, in taking this course, you'll understand how to do that.