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Community Blog Alibaba DevOps Practice Guide Preface

Alibaba DevOps Practice Guide Preface

The preface (Part 0) of this 27-part series briefly explains DevOps and its importance in digitalization.

This article is from Alibaba DevOps Practice Guide written by Alibaba Cloud Yunxiao Team

Digitalization is an industrial revolution, and DevOps plays an important role.

Every industrial revolution starts with revolutionary technology, around which new infrastructures are built, new technologies and management paradigms are formed, and the whole industry is completely transformed. Those economies that establish new infrastructure as early as possible and lead the migration of new technologies and management paradigms will rise from an industrial revolution.

The first industrial revolution established the infrastructure of steam power and machine production, forming the basic paradigm of industrialization, from which Britain rose. The second industrial revolution established the infrastructure of internal combustion engines and electrification, forming the basic paradigm of scientific management, and the United States and Germany achieved transcendence.

The digital revolution originated in Silicon Valley in the 1970s. It started with informatization and brought a booming development to the Internet. This was only the beginning. Today, digital transformation is penetrating every industry and driving the deep industrial transformation so enterprises can respond to customers, markets, and the environment more accurately, flexibly, instantly, and efficiently. After the chemical reactions between digitalization and industries, customer experience and industrial efficiency will be qualitatively improved. This is the proposition and challenges that digitalization changes have for each industry.

New digital infrastructures, represented by cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, and IoT, are in place and will continue to evolve. The changes in technologies and management paradigms matching them are more important, such as the digital transformation path, digitalization-oriented organizations, digital comprehensive-process collaboration, and IT R&D modes in the digital age. DevOps has become an IT R&D and management paradigm in the digital age and an important component of enterprises' digital transformation.

What is DevOps? How can enterprises build DevOps capabilities? We must consider these in the context of digital transformation. Specifically, it involves business delivery and system operation.

  1. Smooth and Continuous Delivery of Effective Value with High Quality: It aims to shorten the period from when a business idea is put forward to when it is implemented and delivered. It also aims to make the process smoother and more precise. A digital organization must construct a technical engineering system and a collaboration mode focusing on this goal to eliminate all the obstacles and waiting in the delivery process of business requirements. This way, the IT delivery process can catch up to the business development requirements.
  2. Extremely Elastic and Resilient System Operation: IT systems must meet the requirements of business operations and have ultimate elasticity and resilience. Elasticity refers to the automatic and real-time scaling along with the business load to meet the business needs with accurate elasticity and reasonable cost. Resilience refers to the guarantee of safe, compliant, and stable system operation to realize continuous availability, security, and stability of the system operation.

Both aspects require the IT development department and IT O&M department to break down the technical, process, and organizational barriers. This is also known as DevOps. Integration is a means, and the final results must be reflected in smooth business delivery and continuous and stable system operation. All these must be based on the business, connecting the process from business to development and O&M. Then, it must achieve the organic integration of business, product, and O&M and form an efficient closed-loop of business delivery, operation, and feedback. Strictly speaking, DevOps should be BizDevOps that includes business. We still call it DevOps to continue the habits of the industry, but it must include business and be fundamentally business-driven.

DevOps is a new development paradigm in the digital age. It requires changes in the collaboration mode and engineering technologies, which complement and restrict each other. The Alibaba DevOps practice guides will be described in two aspects, collaboration modes and engineering technologies. Engineering technologies correspond to agile development, and collaboration modes correspond to agile organizations. They help organizations adapt to the digital transformation and allow technologies to play a central role, thus accelerating business development and leading business innovation.

Organizations that seize this opportunity will stand out from the tide of digital transformation, and DevOps is an indispensable part of it. I hope our practice summary will inspire you.

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