Modern DevOps versus traditional DevOps

DevOps is a set of principles and practices, as well as a philosophy, that encourage the participation of both the development and operations teams in the entire software development life cycle, software maintenance, and operations. To implement this, organizations manage several processes and tools that help automate the software delivery process to improve speed and agility, reduce the cycle time of code release through continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and monitor the applications running in production.

DevOps' traditional approach would be to establish a DevOps team consisting of Dev, QA, and Ops members and work toward the common goal to create better software quicker. While there would be a focus on automating software delivery, the automating tools such as Jenkins, Git, and so on were installed and maintained manually. This led to another problem as we now had to manage another set of IT infrastructure. It finally boiled down to infrastructure and configuration, and the focus was to automate the automation process.

With the advent of containers and the recent boom in the public cloud landscape, DevOps' modern approach came into the picture, which involved automating everything. Right from provisioning infrastructure to configuring tools and processes, there is code for everything. Now, we have infrastructure as code, configuration as code, immutable infrastructure, and containers. I call this approach to DevOps modern DevOps, and it will be the entire focus of this book.

Containers help implement modern DevOps and form the core of the practice. We'll have a look at how in the next section.