10 years before when no DevOps exist how did organizations deliver new features to customers.
There will be multiple developers working on the feature, once development completed code will be check-in to a central repository.
to deliver the new feature to customers it required the help of the following people,
Build and Release engineer
System Administrator
Server Admin
System Admin will create a server, and to run application the server needs to be setup in a way and it will be done by the server admin. Once the server and the environment required for running the application is ready, the build and release engineer will take the code from the central repository and deploy it to server.
Then testers would test the application running on the server created by the system admin.After test completed, build and release engineer will promote this to next level that is staging environment. After application is tested on stage environment , build and release engineer would promote it to production where customers access it.
This process is not completed just in one day, it might take more than a week to complete. The end goal is to deliver new features to customers, and in that process, many people are getting involved.
Here the delivery of features to customers will take more time, maybe two weeks, and also a lot of manual operations included.
There are a lot of other problems needed to be discussed in this scenario, but my intention was to discuss them on a high level how it happen and various teams such as system admins, and build engineers, etc involved in this process.
what is DevOps?
DevOps is a culture that improves an organisation's capabilities to deliver features faster thus increasing their business. Culture means a set of best practices, I have discussed some of the best DevOps automation practices here.
just think of it like how we can reduce the delivery time from 2 weeks to 1 week.
But it is not just delivering faster , also consider the above factors at most importantly
Automation
Quality
Monitoring
Testing