DevOps in the Real World

In the past few years, the software world has evolved at a very high pace. One of my favorite examples of evolution is FinTech, a new field whose name comes from the fusion of finance and technology. In this field, companies tend to build financial products in a disruptive way up to a point that they are threatening the big traditional banks and putting them in jeopardy.

This happens mainly due to the fact that big companies lose the ability to be cost-effective in their IT systems and banks are fairly big companies. It is not strange that banks still run their systems in an IBM mainframe and are reluctant to move to the cloud, and it is also not strange that the core components of the banks are still COBOL applications that haven't been renewed since the 90s. This wouldn't be bad if it wasn't because a small number of talented engineers with an AWS or Google Cloud Platform account can actually build a service that could virtually replace some bank products such as currency exchange or even a broker.

This has become a norm in the last few years, and one of the keys for the success of small companies in FinTech is partially due to DevOps and partially due to its scale. Usually, big companies commoditize the IT systems over time, outsourcing them to third parties that work on price, pushing the quality aside. This is a very effective cost-cutting measure, but it has a downside: you lose the ability to deliver value quickly.

In this chapter, we are going to put DevOps into perspective and see how it can help us create cost-effective work units that can deliver a lot of value in a very short period of time.