127
votes
Accepted
What is an artifactory?
Artifactory is a product by JFrog that serves as a binary repository manager. That said very often one will use a 'artifactory' as a synonym of the more general binary repository, much like many ...
- 1,946
92
votes
Accepted
What is the definition of "cattle not pets"?
Randy Bias chronicles the history of the term stating that it probably originated in 2011 or 2012 when Bill Baker used the analogy when describing "scale-up" vs. "scale-out" architectural strategies. ...
- 11.6k
66
votes
Accepted
What is the difference between Sysadmin and DevOps Engineer?
Mainly DevOps is not a role (when used as such it's more a buzzword than a real role).
DevOps is roughly an organization pattern aiming at breaking the silo between developers and sysadmins.
The main ...
- 11.3k
56
votes
Accepted
What is the difference between SRE and DevOps?
DevOps is about maintaining code, is that correct?
DevOps is not "just" about code, or systems, or any one thing. DevOps is a very general term that covers all things related to software delivery.
...
- 4,068
51
votes
Accepted
What is a "Walking Skeleton"?
A "Walking Skeleton" is a form of "proof of concept" of your basic architectural concept. Where a proof of concept typically focuses more on a single functionality, a "Walking Skeleton" is a ...
- 974
47
votes
Accepted
What's the difference between DevOps and Automation?
A big part of DevOps is making it possible to release very often. That comes with automated build, automated testing, etc. You can say that to achieve its goals, DevOps need to use automation to be ...
- 1,955
47
votes
Accepted
What is Serverless?
Wikipedia's article on serverless computing provides a decent introduction to the topic:
Serverless computing, also known as function as a service (FaaS), is a cloud computing code execution model ...
- 1,532
40
votes
Accepted
What is an artifact repository?
During development you generate a fair amount of different artifacts. These might include:
The source code
The compiled application
A deployable package
Documentation
and potentially others as well
...
- 1,577
32
votes
Accepted
Is DevOps restricted to companies with SaaS products?
Absolutely not!
DevOps is all about breaking down the traditional silos (departments) in order to be more efficient.
Better communication between teams, improved visibility and reliable and ...
- 1,955
30
votes
What is the definition of "cattle not pets"?
To add to Richards answer, generally the analogy is helpful in terms of considering the impact of the loss of a server.
If you would feel some sort of distress over the loss of any individual piece ...
- 1,734
29
votes
Accepted
What is an artifact (or artefact)?
Wikipedia has a very good answer to this question. Artifact, sometimes also called Derived Object, is a product of some process applied to the Code Repository. Originally they were called Build ...
- 5,807
27
votes
Accepted
How does continuous integration relate to continuous delivery / deployment?
Continuous delivery and continuous deployment both take continuous integration one step further, by adding a 'deployment to production' step to the process.
The difference between continuous delivery ...
- 577
26
votes
Accepted
Is DevOps compatible with ITIL?
In my opinion, the DevOps culture come along with a methodology change toward Agile process management.
ITIL is heavily aimed at a clear formalism of the process and the results and thus more adapted ...
- 11.3k
26
votes
Accepted
Why shouldn't I try to hire a 'DevOps Engineer'?
TL;DR: You should never try to hire a DevOps Team
There are essentially three most common roles to hire for:
DevOps Architect / Evangelist
DevOps Engineer
CI/CD Engineer
These roles are distinct ...
- 5,807
26
votes
What is an artifactory?
The way it helped me understand initially, the difference between source code repository and binary repository was to think of it like:
* Github or Bitbucket is useful to maintain all 'code'
* Jfrog ...
24
votes
What is the difference between SRE and DevOps?
Dave Swersky already posted an excellent response above with Ben Treynor's definition of SRE, which is as poignant today as it was in 2003.
Fundamentally, it’s what happens when you ask a software ...
- 1,338
23
votes
What is the difference between Sysadmin and DevOps Engineer?
Short Version
DevOps a combination of organisational culture, Agile/Lean ways of working and software automation that when applied to Systems Administration and Operations allows these functions to ...
- 11.6k
22
votes
What are immutable servers?
Immutability is a term often used in computer science circles, which generally boils down to "not possible to change after creation". It is typically used in reference to parallelism, concurrency, ...
- 779
20
votes
What is a container?
The very first thing to know about a container is:
It is, first and foremost, a process.
Once that is understood, one can start to understand how containers compare and contrast with virtual ...
- 4,068
18
votes
What is the difference between SRE and DevOps?
Site Reliability Engineering falls under more or less traditional operations, but heavily automated and version controlled, what is also called Infrastructure as Code. It is a well defined vertical ...
- 5,807
18
votes
Accepted
What Is SecOps?
I'd agree this is a buzzword as much as DevOps can be.
Main task of a SecOps added on top of an usual operational engineer tasks is to take the burden of following CVE publication feeds, handling the ...
- 11.3k
16
votes
Accepted
How to use feature flag toggles?
Feature flags are an engineering device that can be used to avoid long-lived branch and conflicts in product development. Here is how it can be used the context of an object-oriented language to help ...
- 2,610
16
votes
What is Serverless?
Martin Fowler has a good overview:
https://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html
TL;DR
"Serverless" describes application development and architecture that designs applications in which the ...
- 4,068
16
votes
Accepted
What is a Platform Engineer?
I think you would be hard pressed to get a straight definite definition of a Platform Engineer.
Where I'm currently positioned everyone on the team starts out with their own special role but very ...
- 1,734
16
votes
Accepted
What is the difference between DevOps engineer Vs DevOps consultant Vs DevOps architect?
An architect is somebody who thinks and creates designs.
A consultant is somebody who gets hired for things like "Teach us how to do so and so", or to answer questions like "What's your opinion about ...
- 7,185
15
votes
What's the difference between DevOps and Automation?
Automation is a key attribute of DevOps, but it's not the full story. The question is kind-of like "What's the difference between time-boxing and Scrum?".
You'll hear DevOps called a 'culture', a '...
- 779
14
votes
What's the difference between DevOps and Automation?
DevOps is really a cultural shift - it's intended to be about breaking down the traditional barriers between operations and development (and really also with QA and the rest of the business!). The ...
- 650
14
votes
Accepted
What does a "DevOps Transformation" contain?
I need to put my answer to this question in the context of what DevOps is, more specifically within the DevOps transformations I have been part of, DevOps is the ownership of the full Software ...
- 11.6k
14
votes
What is Serverless?
'Serverless', like many things in our space, is becoming an overloaded term.. but generally what it means is "Functionally, Our architecture does not depend on the provisioning or ongoing maintenance ...
- 779
14
votes
Accepted
What is a 'Feature Flag Toggle' and when to use them (or not)?
Without repeating the content of https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html, since it is an amazing in-depth explanation on what feature flag toggles are. I will just focus on the DevOps ...
- 8,963
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible