DevOps Principles and Culture
If you are considering microservices, you really should have a strong devops practice in place, or plan on putting one in place. A good devops culture is one that institutes freedom and responsibility, and reduces process. Devops often includes engineering and operations functions in the same team. Many of the benefits we discussed earlier are as much a result of strong devops practices as they are a result of microservices architecture:
• Collaboration
• Automation
• Monitoring
In a devops environment teams are cross-functional, consisting of developers, QA, DBAs, and operations. The shift to devops is often made to accelerate feature delivery and provide stability in that delivery. Context is not lost among teams as the application transitions from engineering to operations, or in feedback from operations to engineering. Engineering and operations people work together to build, design, deploy, and manage the application. The team is accountable for not only the development but also the business operations of the service. This accountability helps improve all those things about the application that make it easier to manage in production and more stable.
• Faster delivery of features through continuous software delivery
• Less complex problems
• Faster resolution to problems
• More time to add features
As mentioned, many of the benefits of devops have also been presented as benefits of a microservices architecture. The two are complimentary and the microservices architecture enables devops at scale. Devops success is also dependent on building a devops culture throughout the organization, and this can be a significant organizational shift.