DevOps Culture - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 190

waredevelopment methodology,releaseengineershand-buildbinariesfortheQAenviron-
ment and deploy them in an ad hoc fashion. In continuous deployment, the build is auto-
mated and each stage uses the same process for deployment.
A “smoke test” is a basic functionality test, like plugging in a device and seeing if it
starts to smoke (it shouldn't!). Including built-in diagnostic tests as part of your build and
deployment automation gives you high confidence that what you just deployed meets the
basic functionality requirements. The build or deploy will error out if the built-in tests fail,
letting you know something is wrong.
Instead of patching a failure and proceeding with patches, continuous delivery wants us
to find a root cause and fix the problem. We then work the process again to verify that the
problem has disappeared.
CD produces an installation package that is tested sufficiently sothat it can be deployed
into production. However, actually pushing that release into production is a business de-
cision. Deployments are usually less frequent, perhaps daily or weekly. There may be ad-
ditional tests that the deployment team performs and the actual deployment itself may
be complex and manual. Automating those practices and doing them frequently (perhaps
as frequently as new packages are available) constitutes continuous deployment. This ap-
proach is discussed further in Section 11.10 .
8.7 Summary
In this chapter, we examined the culture and principles of DevOps and looked at its his-
torical antecedents—namely, Agile and continuous delivery. The principles and practices
in this chapter serve as a strong foundation for a shift in culture and attitude in the work-
place about operations and maintenance tasks. This shift brings measurable efficiency and
increased uptime when it is strongly applied, and you should explore it for yourself.
Theo Schlossnagle (2011) describes DevOps as the natural response to “the operation-
alism of the world.” As velocity increases in companies of every type, the most successful
competitors will be those organizations that are “operationally focused” in every business
unit.
DevOps is not about a technology. DevOps is about solving business problems ( Ed-
wards 2010 ) . It starts with understanding the business needs and optimizing processes to
best solve them.
DevOps makes businesses run more smoothly and enables the people involved to work
together more effectively. It gives us hope that operations can be done well at any scale.