DevOps’ traditional approach involved establishing a DevOps team consisting of Dev, QA, and Ops members and working toward creating better software faster. However, while there would be a focus on automating software delivery, automation tools such as Jenkins, Git, and others 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. From provisioning infrastructure to configuring tools and processes, there is code for everything. So, now, we have IaC, CaC, immutable infrastructure, and containers. I call this approach to DevOps modern DevOps, and it will be the focus of this book.
The following table describes some of the key similarities and differences between modern DevOps and traditional DevOps:
Table 1.1 – Key similarities and differences between modern DevOps and traditional DevOps
It’s important to note that the distinction between modern DevOps and traditional DevOps is not strictly binary as organizations can adopt various practices and technologies along a spectrum. The modern DevOps approach generally focuses on leveraging cloud technologies, automation, containerization, and DevSecOps principles to enhance collaboration, agility, and software development and deployment efficiency.
As we discussed previously, containers help implement modern DevOps and form the core of the practice. We’ll have a look at containers in the next section.
