FAQ

DevOps is all about digital companies implementing practices to be able to release faster at a lower rate of failure with the end-goal of having a faster time to market. The practices revolve around culture, communication, tools and measurement.

Many people in SaaS companies talk about their DevOps team, DevOps person or DevOps practices. Strictly speaking, it cannot be a person or a team. However when people refer to these roles they usually mean the people that have an enabling role in enabling those practices. Usually in combination with a platform focus: CI/CD, cloud, orchestration,
monitoring, etc.

Typically the goals are:

• Improved deployment frequency;
• Faster time to market;
• Lower failure rate (of new releases);
• Faster mean time to recovery

Typically the work revolves around technologies like public cloud (like AWS or Azure), CI/CD (like Github and Concourse), monitoring (like Grafana and Prometheus), orchestration tooling (like Terraform) and is mostly in close cooperation with the development teams.

Still looking for more: Wikipedia article on DevOps

Cloud Native Computing is an approach in building software solutions, as often used for SaaS companies. It is a combination of maximised use of cloud computing,
extensive use of open source, micro-service oriented architectures and modern development methodologies.

Amazon Web Services, or in short AWS, is a subsidiary of Amazon that offers computing services as a utility. It is one of the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platforms. In 2020, AWS' offering is comprised of over 212 fully featured services in different categories:

• AI and Machine Learning
• Big Data
• Computing
• Storage
• Networking
• Databases
• Analytics
• Application services
• Deployment management
• Mobile frameworks
• Various developer tools
• Internet of Things

AWS has an excellent global reach. As of 2019, AWS has distinct operations in 22 geographical "regions" with even more coming.

They are considered one the main leaders in the public cloud space and offer a while range of IaaS, PaaS and even SaaS services.

AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a software layer that schedules your containers, monitors them, and keeps them running. It manages and scales the underlying cloud resources, like AWS EC2 instances or AWS Fargate layer.

AWS ECS was introduced back in 2014, and it was AWS' first attempt at offering a solution for managed container orchestration. AWS fully manages the control plane; you only need to provision the worker instances, which consist of a container runtime and the ECS agent. It offers built-in integration with other AWS services like EC2 load balancers (application, network, and classic), CloudWatch Logs, and IAM."

AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a software layer that in essence schedules your containers, monitors them, and keeps them running. It manages and scales the underlying cloud resources, like AWS EC2 instances or AWS Fargate layer.

AWS EKS was introduced back in 2018, and it was AWS' entry into offering a Managed Kubernetes offering. AWS fully manages the control plane; you only need to provision the worker instances.

Kubernetes, often abbreviated to K8s, is an open-source container-orchestration platform. At its core it automates application deployment, scaling, and management. After some time in development at Google, it is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Quite some time ago Google coined the the term SRE or Site Reliability Engineer as part of the function Site Reliability Engineering. This role is now popping up more and more and is even replacing the widespread use of "DevOps Engineer".

The definition according to Wikipedia:

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline that incorporates aspects of software engineering and applies them to infrastructure and operations problems. The main goals are to create scalable and highly reliable software systems.

It is about a half/half split between:

1. Operations: supporting (internal) customers, fixing issues, doing manual changes, etc
2. Automation and development: preventing recurring problems and improving operational quality through automation

Typically the work revolves around technologies like public cloud (like AWS or Azure), CI/CD (like Github and Concourse), monitoring (like Grafana and Prometheus), orchestration tooling (like Terraform) and is mostly in close cooperation with the development teams.

You could also consider SRE as an prescribed method on implementing DevOps.