Sys engineering is my background. Infosec is what I am. Solutions architecture is what I do. Devops is how I do it.
SE (Software engineering) Devops:
I implement Agile at team scale through continuous integration/continuous development. I build continuous integration pipelines. I also build Big Data pipelines.
Working with both SE and Operations, I automate the continuous deployment of continuously developed applications.
Any SE that I do is from the Devops side of the House i.e. getting the management of the software engineering process right is more important than getting the code architecture right, and getting the code architecture is more important than getting the code well written and well documented.
Operations Devops:
I implement better business continuity and better disaster recovery through continuous deployment.
I implement Agility through scalability on demand - No more old style capacity planning. If you operate your web site as a service provider and revenue generator, it is mission-critical that you implement Agility in Operations.
The systematic consistency, reliability and up to dateness of "Infrastructure as code" and "immutable infrastructure" is what I want to have. The code has to to be idempotent, it has to be up to date and it has to work. Period. Any unauthorized change in infrastructure will be eliminated as the code that controls the infrastructure is run. Period. ANY change in infrastructure must be implemented through changes in the code. Period.
I don't want to guess at what somebody wrote in their documentation 6 months ago and hope that it is up to date if I have to restore a full network now - and I an restoring it within hours not weeks not a month.
Providing Agility in Operations through scalability requires excellence and proficiency in Cloud operations. I view AWS as providing the most complete set of services of any Cloud provider. However, no one does Data Analytics like IBM, no one does SEO and low latency hyper scalability like Google and presumably, no one does Windows Server instances and enterprise-scale Active Directory like Microsoft. The optimal setup will involves mixing and matching of best of breed Cloud services.
Security Devops aka SecDevOps:
Working with SE and Operations, I apply "infrastructure as code" and "immutable infrastructure" to deploy patches quickly and reliably - I love being able to blue-green within 25 minutes a production network that's been hit by zero-day malware. "Immutable infrastructure" is especially valuable to me because I am more worried about users with all the right permissions doing stupid like leaving doors open for random hackers to find. Work with software engineering teams to implement app security through microservices architecture and input validations and to have them architect their apps for cost-effective audit compliance.
And yes, proficiency in orchestration tools is mission critical.
