One of the latest Job Roles in IT in recent years is DevOps – Development & Operations Specialist that tunes up a Software Build System. It has the task to link the work of coders, managers, clients, users, and System Administrators. The last role is un-humanized and replaced by Cloud Software Services. The Cloud Tools handle programmatically and from User Interface layer – the Server Systems.
First, it is for an individuals and organizations that do have their own or manage services for clients. If you are only focused on the development, the management and business part, you don’t care. Someone else is taking care.
Prerequisite – Probably all Development Platforms have options for building your software package from a command line. Java has ant, maven and gradle. NodeJS has NPM. Every software tool managed by Jenkins like platform could trigger a chain of builds. There are some platform dependencies in some cases, that cannot be worked around. If you have the necessary idle hardware and software, you’ll be able to run it on your own, if not rent it.
Why? There are several reasons why.
Dependency vulnerability updates. For example, WordPress, served by many big hosting providers is managed, updated – along side all the plugins. This means – you as a user will get all things patched up and updated automatically. If you have made a software setup up where updates from dependencies are tracked, you could have automatic rebuild and redeployment.
Development and/or Build Time Saving – This needs special architectural thinking and approach and initial investment to get it right. If you’ve organized everything correctly, the small changes will update small part of the Services and the swapped executables will be small and timely updated.
Monitor Stuff from Everywhere. If you’ve got the Build System correctly, you’ll be able to watch the status and statistics of stuff, exposed to you – on the fly. By using mobile devices from everywhere, you’ll get eventually to a computer – fast or at list in close to real time of problem arising.
Delegate Work to Computer – The philosophical goal of technology is to do the work instead of as. When done properly – Tech is better scaled up – Even without human intervention.