Devops & Open Source are Perfect Technical Match, How?

Much like chocolate and peanut butter, DevOps & Open Source are two great tastes that taste great together? Yes, the following post emphasizes on how DevOps and open source is a perfect cultural and technical match.

Being a successful person is about taking advantage of every opportunity that comes your way. DevOps and open source are some of the growing key trends in the software world today but are rarely discussed in tandem. Perhaps that should change, do you know why? Because DevOps and open source have much more in common.

About Devops and Open Source

penetration testing and pros cons

Before we jump on how DevOps and open source are related, let’s define the two terms respectively.

DevOps, is a simple approach to production, software design and management that emphasize constant collaboration, “agile” technologies, and workflows. DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops).

In addition to this, the term also results in the reduction of complex applications and tasks into small, manageable parts.

Whereas Open source is a paradigm of source code management & sharing that prioritizes the free availability of source code so that users and developers can customize or extend applications as they see fit.

Difference

However, DevOps and open source aren’t entirely related concepts as DevOps can be done without making use of the open source. And it is possible to adopt or write open-source programs without adhering to the DevOps philosophy. In addition to this, open-source emerged decades before the DevOps movement. Which means they are not historically intertwined or related.

Do They Have Anything In Common?

No matter how different these concepts are they are functionally related in several ways.

  • Flexibility- DevOps community prefers technology and methodologies that are agile. Due to which they can easily be modified extended or replaced. Open source is popular for the similar reason; with access to source code, anyone can customize or extend an open source program.
  • Work simultaneously- I am sure you will come across several professionals talking about the importance of working parallel in an open source software development company. Which simply means teams such as developers and software testers requires to work on different tasks like coding and QA tests at the same time. After all, parallel workflows lead to faster results and allow a more efficient use of time. Similarly, open source teams require focusing on different internal workflows at the same time.
  • Maximum collaboration- The modern incarnation arose from an idea that software production works best when a large, decentralized community. DevOps is similar in that it emphasizes the importance of allowing different teams to work side-by-side, rather than leaving them in isolated silos. Also there are web-apps like Papertrail, a cloud hosted log management tool which allows you to instantly manage logs from different servers and boost productivity.

Overlap

Further speaking about DevOps and open source culture, there's a profound conceptual and philosophical overlap seen between them over these years.

Speed

Being a DevOps engineer, one always aims to deliver on a continuous basis; Open source advocates like to push out new code quickly, too. Sharing code freely and relying on a community of developers for implementing new features, they can churn out updates at a dizzying pace. Did you know that fast releases were one of the factors that helped Linux to take off in the 1990s?

Efficiency

If there is something that both DevOps folks and open-source fans hate, its waste.

DevOps professionals end up wasting a lot of time optimizing application performance and ensuring that their infrastructure isn’t over or under-provisioned.

Similarly, open-source developers tend to share code partly because it turns out to be pretty much efficient.

Instead of having to duplicate software that someone else has already written, you can make use of open-source code borrowing from others and focus to write something new.

Merit

It may quite interest you to know that DevOps and open-source engineers alike tend to believe that people must be judged on the basis of merit. In case, if you join open sources, chances are that no one cares where you live, which language you speak or which degrees you have. And what matters is whether you can contribute useful code.

In a similar way, DevOps emphasizes the importance of placing less emphasis on official titles and more on allowing people to get jobs done based on their abilities. Moreover, they don’t even hesitate in arguing that not all opinions are equal in the DevOps community.

Dissent

Now we all are well aware of the fact that open-source (and free software) community is famous for its quarrels and strong opinions. Chances are there that DevOps professionals may not generate quite as much controversy but they still tend to have deeply held beliefs.

In fact, you will come across certain professionals who don’t like open-source and not all open source practices and ideas parallel the DevOps world. Still, there are strong cultural connections between open source and DevOps -- certainly much stronger ones than there are between DevOps and closed source.

Conclusion

The modern world is full of outstanding and unique opportunities- It’s a jungle out there. So, feel free to explore as much as you can!