These kinds of questions I see all the time in forums and even water-cooler discussions. Hovering around these like bees around honey (or other more sinister comparisons) are questions like, what should I know in able to do devops? Is my company doing devops? Should devops do this task or should ops?
The only questions I am going to answer here is this one: What is devops? A google or AI search can quickly give you the bigger picture of the history of devops. Devops, currently is a mindset. Yes there are departments called devops, but they should be encouraging devops principles throughout the organisation, not just in their department and management should be backing them up.
Devops, in plain and simple terms is: Improving the efficiency of the process/es of building and packaging code and deploying those packages to the relevant environments.
Does this entail many different aspects of the software development lifecycle? Of course. Could this involve many different tools? Of course. Does this include various technologies? Yes. Does this mean your process is ever perfect, have you “arrived”. No. Devops is the constant strive for improvement.
For example, if building code on a developer’s laptop and then copying over that artefact to a server is your company’s process, then if you created a git repo somewhere and developers are now pushing their code to the git repo, you were doing devops. It may not seem like much, however, from now on forward, for that module, the code lives in a central repository where more than one developer can work on it at a time and it now has version control, tracking of history as well as many options to which you can connect a build pipeline. No matter how small the improvement in the process, it is doing devops. However, one principle remains true, try to do what is the easiest and will make the biggest impact first so you have good gains early on.
So, back to the question. Are you helping to improve the process by which code is being built and deployed? Then yes, you are doing devops. Are you doing devops while automating scripts for finance reporting? I would argue no, however you are embracing the “agile” and “automation first” principles which are two of the cornerstones of the devops discipline which I mentioned really quickly early on. (Were you paying attention?)
In my next post I will address the next most commonly asked question: “Will I enjoy devops if I choose it as a career?”