DevOps

Before DevOps

Systems administration as a craft has a sloppy history. System administrators previously would manage hardware manually by either connecting to and provisioning machines in a physical server rack or over a cloud provisioning API. In addition to the manual provisioning process, large amounts of manual configuration work was a regular routine. Administrators would keep custom collections of imperative scripts and configurations, cobble them together, and place them in various places. These scripts could break at any time or get lost. Collaboration was challenging as the custom tool chains were not regularly documented or shared.

The DevOps movement arose from this primordial swamp of systems administration. DevOps borrowed the best ideas from software engineering and applied them to systems administration, where the cobbled-together tools became version-controlled code.

IaC is one of the biggest revelations of DevOps. Previously system administrators favored custom imperative scripts to configure systems. Imperative software follows a sequence of steps to achieve a desired state.


Children
  1. IaC (Infrastructure-as-Code)