DevOps & Engineering

CI/CD, infrastructure automation, SRE, platform engineering

DevOps is the intersection of software development (Dev) and the IT operations (Ops) side, and is intended to bridge the divide between developers and operations running infrastructure. It brings together people, processes and technology and works through automation, collaboration and continuous delivery. This continuity is a key principle in DevOps: a CI/CD pipeline refers to Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery or Deployment, and is an automated workflow that aims to streamline software development.

DevOps aims to improve organisational culture through shared ownership and collaboration between teams, bringing together development, operations and security teams which previously were more likely to be working in silos. The automation of processes reduces human error in deployment and reduces the number of slow and manual human processes that workers have to carry out. The continuous nature of DevOps work means that teams can make small and frequent updates to production while keeping the product safe. Monitoring and feedback allows teams to use real-time data to learn about how the system is performing and use that to inform future iterations.

Within DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is an engineering-led approach to implementing the principles of DevOps. It focuses on system uptime, reliability and the ability to automate operational tasks. SRE applies the principles of software engineering to IT infrastructure and operations.

Platform engineering is a discipline that uses DevOps principles to build and maintain Internal Developer Platforms (IDP) that enable self-service workflows. IDPs provide developers with a unified interface where they can build, test and deploy applications. They reduce cognitive load on developers and allow organisational standards to be enforced.