DevOps

Also Known As

TL;DR

Explanation

DevOps breaks down silos between development (building features) and operations (running infrastructure), promoting shared ownership of the full software lifecycle. Key practices include CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible), containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes), monitoring and observability, and blameless post-mortems. For PHP developers, DevOps means owning deployments, writing meaningful health checks and metrics, and participating in on-call rotations. The DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, time to restore) measure DevOps effectiveness.

Common Misconception

Why It Matters

Common Mistakes

• Treating DevOps as a job title or team name rather than a cultural practice — it requires collaboration across all roles.
• Automating deployment without improving feedback loops — automation without observability is blind.
• Focusing on tools (Docker, Kubernetes) before addressing team process and communication.
• Measuring DevOps success by deployment frequency alone — reliability and recovery time matter equally.

Code Examples

// DevOps anti-pattern — dev throws over the wall:
// Developer: 'Works on my machine, ops problem now'
// Operations: 'Dev broke prod again'
// No shared ownership, no blameless postmortems
// No developer access to production metrics
// Result: slow deploys, slow incident response, low morale

# DevOps practices for PHP teams

# Infrastructure as Code
# terraform/
#   main.tf    — EC2, RDS, ElastiCache
#   variables.tf

# Dockerised PHP app:
FROM php:8.3-fpm-alpine
RUN docker-php-ext-install pdo_mysql opcache
COPY --from=composer /usr/bin/composer /usr/bin/composer
WORKDIR /var/www/app
COPY . .
RUN composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader

# docker-compose.yml (local dev):
services:
  php:
    build: .
    volumes: [.:/var/www/app]
  nginx:
    image: nginx:alpine
  mysql:
    image: mysql:8.0
    environment: {MYSQL_DATABASE: app, MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: secret}
  redis:
    image: redis:alpine

# Monitoring: error rates, response times, queue depth
# SLO: 99.5% requests < 500ms, < 0.1% error rate

References

• ↗ https://cloud.google.com/architecture/devops/devops-culture-westrum-organizational-culture

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