Q&A Fridays Recap: DevOps

Last month we ran our second Twitter Q&A, with the topic of DevOps. Our in-house expert was our Senior Operations Engineer and co-organiser of DevOpsDays London, Bob Walker.

Technical operations (ops) is responsible for the provisioning, deployment, and essential maintenance of digital services.

The dxw ops team explains, “Having in-house operations at dxw as part of a multidisciplinary team allows us to learn from the entire lifecycle of a project, and apply that experience elsewhere.”

Bob took to Twitter to explain his opinions about on-call, incident response, learning reviews, and his own personal definition of DevOps.

Bob’s personal definition of DevOps

According to Bob, DevOps is, “Everyone working together to ship code to production to make things better for the users” with a side order of  “everyone is on-call.”

Essential Tools and Techs

Nuno Silva (nunosilva800) asked if there are tools/techs that Bob just can’t live without?

Bob explains, “Everything should be infrastructure as code, so git and linters. I personally couldn’t live without VI. These days terraform is probably an essential tool.”

Chatops

Stig Brautaset (@stigbra) asked, “How to get started with chatops?”

Bob answered, “Well first is to surface information in your chat channel and then think what is the simplest thing to have kicked off by a chat command. Starting deploys via chat is probably the biggest win if you aren’t already continuously deploying. We have stuff to acknowledge alerts via slack.”

Thanks to Bob for his expertise on this subject. You can follow him on Twitter @rjw1. 

If you’d like to take part in November’s Q&A (details to be announced shortly), follow us on @dxw or sign up to our newsletter for more information.