DevOps

For the last 3 years I’ve been working in Systems Administration, specifically focusing on Cloud Infrastructure, and working directly with Development teams to try and make deploying websites as easy as possible.

I sometimes find it hard to describe what I do in a few words, suggesting that “I work in IT” doesn’t really leave me feeling warm and fuzzy. I’d rather string buzzwords together like “Cloud Infrastructure Architecture” than handle being compared to Roy from The IT Crowd, and accept the stereotypes that go with it.

That said, I do enjoy working in this part of IT. There is something very refreshing about walking into the office, knowing that the development team will have somehow invited a new problem for me to solve, and I don’t mean that sarcastically.

DevOps is becoming a rather popular, and interesting process. A lot of people struggle to define it, so I’m not going to do that here, but it does require a good mix of people working together to solve Web/App Development challenges. You need a good mix of Developer, QA and Designer types supported by Infrastructure and Security Engineers. Obviously people can wear more than one hat, as long as nobody tries to do everything.

For the indoctrinated already, I’m mainly using a mix of AWS services, specifically AWS Opsworks (Chef), RDS, Cloudfront with Vagrant and Jenkins for local tooling.