“Currently, DevOps is more like a philosophical movement, not yet a precise collection of practices, descriptive or prescriptive.” — — Gene Kim
DevOps is a philosophy and framework that is always growing. It promotes quicker, better application development as well as quicker distribution of new or updated software features or goods to customers.
The DevOps methodology promotes business value delivery to clients of an organization that is quicker, better, and more secure. More frequent product releases, features, or updates could represent this value. It may have to do with how quickly a product update or new function reaches customers while maintaining the necessary standards of quality and security. Or it might concentrate on how soon a problem or bug is found, fixed, and then re-released.
Software performance, availability, and reliability are all supported by the underlying infrastructure as it is initially designed, tested, and then put into production.
Supporters of DevOps list a number of commercial and technical advantages, many of which can make customers happier. Among the advantages of DevOps are:
- Faster, better product delivery
- Faster issue resolution and reduced complexity
- Greater scalability and availability
- More stable operating environments
- Better resource utilization
- Greater automation
- Greater visibility into system outcomes
- Greater innovation
Netflix’s move to cloud
The worst outage in Netflix’s history occurred in 2008 when a significant database corruption prevented them from shipping DVDs to members for three days. A third of Netflix’s 8.4 million subscribers at the time were impacted by the outage. It spurred Netflix to upgrade their infrastructure and go to the cloud. It took Netflix close to seven years to complete its cloud transformation after choosing AWS as its partner.
In order to continuously evaluate its capacity to withstand unanticipated disruptions without affecting users, Netflix developed Chaos Monkey. A script called Chaos Monkey systematically destroys production instances and architectural services throughout all Netflix settings.After their success with Chaos Monkey, Netflix engineers wanted to test their resilience to all sorts of inevitable failures, detect abnormal conditions. So, they built the Simian Army, a virtual army of tools discussed below.
In order to address the aforementioned issues, Netflix encouraged shared ownership of the entire SDLC and dismantled silos, taking a cue from DevOps principles. A system’s operation and maintenance were the responsibility of the teams that created it. Every team was responsible for handling its own deployment problems, performance bugs, alerting weaknesses, capacity planning, partner support, etc.
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