The protagonists of the modern online project

Due to the increasing complexity of development processes, as well as the growing interest in cloud technologies, where the good old monolithic system can no longer answer all the needs of the product, many developers are faced with the fact that they require much more than knowing a certain language or pattern of programming. Their field of activity is slowly shifting into a niche that requires knowledge not only of programming, but also of IT, to understand operating systems, cloud services, their features, and so on ... Projects are no longer programming ... They are DESIGNED, and these innovations require a different approach, and require a different project development organization.

Earlier in the development of the project were several actors:

Project manager , designer , developer and tester . This team, in principle, was enough to run the project. However, now the list of actors and their responsibilities have expanded. Take at least one developer, because now the development process has become complicated and now the poor fellow should not only create equally well in the browser and on the server, he also has to write automatic tests, learn different tools, know LINUX, not to mention a huge number -we have third-party APIs that "make life easier for him", and yet they are born every day and there are hundreds of them and maybe thousands. And even if he is the best, smart and assiduous developer, he will not be able to move the project beyond his local computer because the project is designed for CLOUD.
There are dozens of servers, different databases and one knowledge of LINUX is not enough for him, because once, uploading the code to the server, it was sold to a dozen others and now he wonders ... "How can I update it?!".

This is where DevOps comes into play . It is he who tweaks your GIT repository to third-party tools that will automatically upgrade your update to dozens of servers, while performing automatic tests. He will set up monitoring system and display logs from the entire system to one place. The rules and criteria by which your system in the cloud will "breathe." Servers will be automatically raised and disconnected, databases will be replicated, and data will be passed through different channels to eventually appear on your computer screen. In general, without DevOps it will be sooooo hard, either the project will limp, or the developer will take this exorbitant burden on their shoulders, which again will affect the quality and time of project development.

The next specialist, without whom it is difficult to manage when designing a modern project, is an architect . An architect is a person who has knowledge in both IT and programming.

He sees the overall picture of the project from the technological side and will be able to put together all the technical details of the development and the needs of iron. The architect is the link between the project manager and the technical team. Perhaps, he will also be responsible for choosing a cloud provider, or relying on the chosen service will be able to use the existing services of this provider. Just as the head of the department is able to break one big task into small ones, the Architect breaks up a large project into components. In general, a person should be technically versatile and experienced, that is, there should not be a single successful project behind his shoulders.

The rest of the actors we are used to, such as the tester and the project manager, are also present, but in this article I would like to emphasize the “new” team members, as well as the new requirements for the development in general and the developer. Several times I have encountered a lack of understanding on the part of the management of the requirements to hire an outside architect (for want of his own) for the project at least at the planning stage. Also, until recently, my colleagues thought that a simple outsourcing support service could configure the system and did not understand at all why we needed our own DevOps. It should be said that after a long explanatory process, as well as the development of a pilot project with the help of all the actors, we have in a few weeks successfully raised a prototype product, which later grew into a whole service. Now the team includes all the actors and the work is in full swing. Therefore, it is worth emphasizing that modern products require a lot of explanatory work for individuals and companies where they still think the old way.