How to get to DevOps, how to study and what to read

    About DevOps say a lot and different. We are interested only in the opinion of those who actually implement and follow DevOps principles. So it was a success that DevOpsConf Russia Program Committee includes such people. Taking advantage of my official position, I asked them eight identical questions:

    • What is the main advantage of the DevOps approach, in your opinion?
    • What can most of all interfere with the company's transformation into DevOps?
    • How to integrate security professionals into the software delivery process?
    • What do you think about rising hyip around SRE?
    • What tools today certainly have where they talk about DevOps?
    • What distinguishes a good engineer from a bad one in terms of DevOps?
    • How most logical to get into the profession?
    • How to learn and what to read? Where do you most often read industry news yourself?

    The answers turned out to be very curious and at the same time allow us to make some impression about those who put a lot of effort and a little soul into the  schedule of our conference. For example, the answer to the first question is broader than the time-to-market abbreviation. Opinions about SRE diverged, but everyone almost unanimously advised to read “The DevOps Handbook”, but also gave a bunch of recommendations - followed by a cat.


    Данила Штань
    Danila Shtan CTO in Yandex. Verticals , advocates DevOps, appreciates soft-skills above professional skills and likes to talk. For example, last year, at that time, even at RootConf, Danilo told how to build a self-organizing service infrastructure, managing with fairly simple technical solutions, popular software products and agreements within the team.


    - What is the main advantage of the DevOps approach, in your opinion?
    Responsibility is not for your nut to 8, but for the fact that the two parts, fastened with a bolt, held together.

    - What can most of all interfere with the company's transformation in DevOps?
    "I will not do someone else's work." In general, the division of work into "their" and "alien" .

    - How to integrate security professionals into the software delivery process?
    Approximately the same as designers, for example. They tell the basic concepts and requirements of their subject area, and then participate in the review and acceptance.

    - What do you think about rising hyip around SRE?
    And he only rises? It seemed to me that he had long been here. SRE is glorified ops , I don’t really like this concept.

    - What tools today certainly have where they talk about DevOps?
    Keyboard, screen and headphones :)

    - What makes a good engineer from a bad one in terms of DevOps?
    The desire to be the best nut specialist in the world by 8.

    - How is it most logical to get into the profession? Did you yourself leave Dev or Ops?
    It is most logical to love what you do , and there everything will grow together. I'm generally from the project.

    - How to learn and what to read? Where do you most often read industry news yourself?
    I like collections on  highscalability.com , forums on Reddit and engineering blogs of various large and small companies.

    Вячеслав Кузнецов
    Vyacheslav Kuznetsov has led the IT Operations team at Ecwid since the early years of the project’s life. One of the organizers of online meetings of the Hangops community.


    - What is the main advantage of the DevOps approach, in your opinion?
    DevOps allows you to significantly speed up the process of developing software from idea to release, to get rid of problems in the development and maintenance processes.

    - What can most of all interfere with the company's transformation in DevOps?
    People who do not want to change can interfere the most. Not everyone wants change, some fear that they will have no place in the new wondrous world.

    Unfortunately, with the introduction of DevOps approaches, not all problems are solved by tools and process changes. Need support from decision makers. It is necessary to understand the performers, that no one aims to deprive them of work.

    - How to integrate security professionals into the software delivery process?
    Bezopasnik should be involved in the development at the earliest possible stages . At the same time, it is necessary to conduct a dialogue and build processes so that the security tools are as natural a stage as linter or code review.

    - What do you think about rising hyip around SRE?
    In my opinion,SRE is just an implementation of DevOps practices and a bit on top. SRE book by Google is a great collection of practices. They are good to know to expand their horizons, but not all of them are needed in every company.

    - What tools today certainly have where they talk about DevOps?
    Chats, CI / CD, K8S.

    - What makes a good engineer from a bad one in terms of DevOps?
    A good engineer acts on the basis of the needs of the whole team, and not just the needs of his closest group within the team.

    - What is the most logical way to get into the profession? Did you yourself leave Dev or Ops?
    It is important that the DevOps approach solves real problems in your work, then you can sell it to the team. I did not leave Ops, it is not required to practice DevOps :) We have an Ops-team that writes a lot and constantly automates its work. And the development team, in turn, works closely with the infrastructure, also carries on-call duty and investigates incidents.

    - How to learn and what to read? Where do you most often read industry news yourself?
    There are some good books that reveal the essence of DevOps:

    • The DevOps Handbook.
    • The project "Phoenix". A novel about how DevOps is changing business for the better.

    In addition, I liked David J. Anderson’s Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business.

    In order to be aware of the news of the industry there is a bunch of excellent newsletters and channels in the Telegram: Devops Weekly from Gareth Rushgrove, Devops Deflope ( podcast and  channel in the Telegram), Hangops Ru . But the most selective industry news is coming to me on Twitter. The main thing is to follow the right people.

    Дмитрий Зайцев
    Dmitry Zaitsev works as SRE in Humaniq, but has experience in various industries: Gamedev, AdTech, Big Data, FinTech. Developed DevOps and SRE practices when it was not yet fashionable. Combined them with ITIL and Cobit, while they were still in fashion. Also participates in the organization of meetingsHangops_ru .


    - What is the main advantage of the DevOps approach, in your opinion?
    The speed of changes in the product and business, high adaptability in a rapidly changing world.

    - What can most of all interfere with the company's transformation in DevOps?
    No need to transform.

    - How to integrate security professionals into the software delivery process?
    Also, as well as specialists in operation - to shift their work as far as possible along the value delivery chain.

    - What do you think about rising hyip around SRE?
    And I do not see him, to be honest. SRE is simply a set of practices that many good system administrators have been using for a long time.

    - What tools today certainly have where they talk about DevOps?

    • Kubernetes.
    • Prometheus.
    • Terraform.

    - What makes a good engineer from a bad one in terms of DevOps?

    A good engineer focuses on speed of delivery throughout the value chain , a bad one - only on his own part of the chain.

    - What is the most logical way to get into the profession? Did you yourself leave Dev or Ops?
    Get a job at a company that has a digital product. I myself started as an office admin, then Linux, Gamedev, development, and again operation.

    - How to learn and what to read? Where do you most often read industry news yourself?
    I recommend to read:

    • A series of books The Visible Ops, the book "The DevOps Handbook".
    • “Google SRE Book” as a set of good sysadmin practices.
    • “Continuous Delivery” by Jez Humble and David Farley, as a book with answers about the CD.
    • "Heart of Change" from the brothers Khizov, as a guide to change people.

    I can also advise the Hangops community and its Russian brunch Hangops, as a way to taste the industry. Personally, I read it, because there they usually discuss the most significant news, and I look at various mailings like devops / sre / k8s weekly.

    Валерия Пилия
    Valeria Pilia works at Deutsche bank as an Infrastructure Engineer. Engaged in the automation of Deployments and support for product teams. Prior to that, she worked at Video International, Megafon and OneFactor as a maintenance engineer, supported and developed platforms based on the Hadoop ecosystem.


    - What is the main advantage of the DevOps approach, in your opinion?
    Reduction of time to market and greater involvement of all to the result.

    - What can most of all interfere with the company's transformation in DevOps?
    Inertness .

    - How to integrate security professionals into the software delivery process?
    Take advantage of the idea of Security Champions .

    - What do you think about rising hyip around SRE?
    I am for any fight without fights that gives food for thought around professional practices and their application in your particular company.

    - What tools today certainly have where they talk about DevOps?

    • Any version control system.
    • Any software configuration management.
    • Anything for continuous integration / continuous delivery.

    - What makes a good engineer from a bad one in terms of DevOps?
    The ability to see the bottleneck in the process and fix it.

    - What is the most logical way to get into the profession? Did you come out of Dev or Ops?
    I'm from Ops. It seems to me that you can get from the testers, there would be a desire .

    - How to learn and what to read? Where do you most often read industry news yourself?
    A cool discussion of the books was in Hangops, I'm better than there, I will not say. Plus, you can recommend the books of Nassim Taleb and The DevOps Handbook.

    Industry news I read in the channel Devops Deflope .

    Михаил Чинков
    Mikhail Chinkov - Infrastructure Engineer at AMBOSS. As well as evangelist culture DevOps and a member of the community Hangops_ru.


    - What is the main advantage of the DevOps approach, in your opinion?
    The ability to test the development hypotheses of a technology company from the technical side as quickly as possible and with better quality.

    - What can most of all interfere with the company's transformation in DevOps?
    Probably the popular response will be the inertia of the management or executives. I will call the monopolization of the market .

    Even a technology company will not need true DevOps until there are competitors on the horizon. If there are no competitors, money is already dripping, then no one wants to exert extra effort. I worked as an engineer in one such company, and very quickly faced a monopoly, as with the main bottleneck in technical processes that moved, to put it mildly, sluggishly.

    - How to integrate security professionals into the software delivery process?
    Retrain Explain that the world is changing, and the degree of professional paranoia should be gradually reduced . An adequate specialist will quickly adapt to the needs of the business.

    - What do you think about rising hyip around SRE?
    Just like any piece that goes into the well-known Tech Hype Cycle. Soon, people will begin to understand what SRE is in fact, screensavers / positions in companies will die out and, ultimately, Site Reliability Engineering will remain only in those companies that really need it.

    In my opinion, SRE is needed only in emergency cases , when the scale is too large, and the strength of current cloud platforms / services is not enough to cover all operational needs. Such companies all over the world there is a maximum of 20-25.

    - What tools today certainly have where they talk about DevOps?
    It is important to separate "say" and "do." In most companies, DevOps have been talked about for several years, and things are still there.

    Where people really try to introduce practices, there is: Public Cloud (most often AWS),Kubernetes and  Terraform . The remaining terms vary with the situation.

    - What makes a good engineer from a bad one in terms of DevOps?
    Willingness to  share responsibility for the product , business centricity (the person does not do what does not increase the business value), willingness to take the initiative (for example, the desire to improve the technical side of the product instead of accepting the bad and taking it for granted), interest in reverse communication from customers, both internal and external.

    - What is the most logical way to get into the profession? Did you yourself leave Dev or Ops?
    It seems to me that now the profession drive DevOpsin companies, as if it were not called, developed into a separate subject area, and it would be most logical to study at once those things that are required in companies: clouds, monitoring, delivery pipeline and so on. Coding skill comes in the volume itself, exactly necessary for survival.

    I myself came out of the admin room of my native Penza University, not even having time to get to know the VLANs and the features of iSCSI-storage support, so my example is not the best :)

    - How to learn and what to read? Where do you most often read industry news yourself?
    Articles are best taken from the DevOpsLinks, WebOps Weekly mailings . Corey Quinn does awesome AWS newsletter.

    From the must-read books, this is:

    1. The DevOps Handbook.
    2. Infrastructure As Code: Managing Services in the Cloud.
    3. "Web Operations" by john Allspaw.
    4. “Unix and Linux. System Administrator’s Guide, even if the word admin is “phi” for you.
    5. “Continuous Delivery” by Jez Humble and David Farley.
    6. Top-book on the programming language that you choose for infrastructure coding.


    Андрей Шорин
    Andrei Shorin launches the interaction of people where they have not thought about it before. Everywhere he sees opportunities for change and loves to implement them. Proud of the results of work in operation hh.ru (2011-2017).


    - What is the main advantage of the DevOps approach, in your opinion?
    Product readiness for commissioning us at any, even the earliest, stage of development.

    - What can most of all interfere with the company's transformation in DevOps?
    Assign guilty . Debriefing with punishment.

    - How to integrate security professionals into the software delivery process?
    Same as DBA. Invite them to make recommendations and set tasks in the backlog, giving up the right to block the release. It will not be easy .

    - What do you think about rising hyip around SRE?
    I am good with the idea and practice of SRE. HYIP serves to make more people aware of its existence. I love it when the team delves into the essence , and sees a forest behind the HYIP trees.

    - What tools today certainly have where they talk about DevOps?

    • Monitoring not only the status of servers, but also the health of each functional block of the product. My favorite is okmeter.
    • Code review . What is important is not so much a tool as a built route to work on tasks.
    • Continuous integration  - each team selects a specific tool for their way of working.

    - What makes a good engineer from a bad one in terms of DevOps?
    The desire to do their job for the user in constant cooperation with colleagues .

    - What is the most logical way to get into the profession? Did you yourself leave Dev or Ops?
    To be interested not only in algorithms and code, but also in the content of the product, its value for the user. I switched to the DevOps side of Operations because the IT world is getting better through this approach.

    - How to learn and what to read? Where do you most often read industry news yourself?
    Take into account the entire production cycle of the product, in whatever specialty you work. For me, conferences and articles on related topics played a major role, besides my direct work.

    This is an opportune moment to remind you of the YouTube channel address with reports on DevOps, and suggest signing up for a  newsletter in which we are not burdensome telling about new articles and conferences.

    Виталий Рыбников
    Vitaly Rybnikov helps grocery teams to implement DevOps and SRE approaches and practices. Works SRE Tinkoff Bank.


    - What is the main advantage of the DevOps approach, in your opinion?
    Continuous improvement in product quality.

    - What can most of all interfere with the company's transformation in DevOps?
    The lack of an ideological engine that will lead this topic. Lack of support and need from the business. The desire to get a new result, while doing the old things, or not doing anything at all.

    - How to integrate security professionals into the software delivery process?
    They should increase their competencies and integrate into Pipeline by adding and supporting checkers. Plus, regular infrastructure audit, support and development of automated monkey-patching will help.

    - What do you think about rising hyip around SRE?
    So this is ... I’m picking him up :) Come to us at the DevOps Moscow metups and at the DevOpsConf, discuss; -B

    - What tools do you definitely have today where they talk about DevOps?

    • Git;
    • Ansible;
    • Prometheus.

    - What makes a good engineer from a bad one in terms of DevOps?
    The way they relate to their master and how they commit to it.

    - What is the most logical way to get into the profession? Did you yourself leave Dev or Ops?
    I think it’s most logical to get out of Dev, and I myself also came out of Dev. And developers understand better, and I am sure that nothing is impossible.

    - How to learn and what to read? Where do you most often read industry news yourself?
    Learn well from personal experience and practice . Internships or courses can also be useful.

    I advise you to read all the same as colleagues. And I myself often read applications for conferences, thematic channels in Telegram. Offline communication at conferences to keep abreast of trends and trends, irreplaceable.

    DevOpsConf Russia уже 1 и 2 октября. Приходите в Инфопространство, там соберется 500 классных специалистов по интеграции всего и вся, вместе мы решим любые проблемы.

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