Web operations (WebOps) is a domain of expertise within IT systems management that involves the deployment, operation, maintenance, tuning, and repair of web-based applications and systems. WebOps is also increasingly acknowledged as crucial to the success of digital marketing teams, and shows up as part of the MarTech (marketing technology) ecosystem. Historically, operations were seen as a late phase of the

Waterfall model The waterfall model is a breakdown of developmental activities into linear sequential phases, meaning that each phase is passed down onto each other, where each phase depends on the deliverables of the previous one and corresponds to a speciali ...

development process. After engineering had built a software product, and QA had verified it as correct, it would be handed to a support staff to operate the working software. Such a view assumed that software was mostly immutable in production and that usage would be mostly stable. Increasingly, "a web application involves many specialists, but it takes people in web ops to ensure that everything works together throughout an application's lifetime".See http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920000136 The role is gaining respect as a distinct specialty among developers and managers, and is considered by many to be a subset of the larger

DevOps DevOps is the integration and automation of the software development and information technology operations. DevOps encompasses necessary tasks of software development and can lead to shortening development time and improving the development life ...

movement. With the rise of web technologies since mid-1995, specialists have emerged that understand the complexities of running a web application. Earlier examples of IT operations teams exist, such as the

Network Operations Center A network operations center (NOC, pronounced like the word ''knock''), also known as a "network management center", is one or more locations from which network monitoring and control, or network management, is exercised over a computer, teleco ...

(NOC) and the

Database Administration Database administration is the function of managing and maintaining database management systems (DBMS) software. Mainstream DBMS software such as Oracle, IBM Db2 and Microsoft SQL Server need ongoing management. As such, corporations that use D ...

(DBA) function.

WebOps vs DevOps

Web applications are unique in many ways, presenting challenges that other software types do not have to deal with: * Their use by a distributed, often uncontrolled, user base. * The many independent networks between end users and the data center from which content is served. * The way in which web pages are delivered as atomic transactions, requiring additional technologies (such as

HTTP cookies HTTP cookie (also called web cookie, Internet cookie, browser cookie, or simply cookie) is a small block of data created by a web server while a user is browsing a website and placed on the user's computer or other device by the user's web br ...

) to associate sequences of pages into a user interaction. * The three-tiered model of web, application, and

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...

components (such as LAMP environments consisting of

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

, Apache,

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...

and either

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...

). * The requirement that you must often import the application's database and uploaded files (including potentially sensitive user data) to properly develop or test the application (such as when building a

content management system A content management system (CMS) is computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content ( content management).''Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy''. Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, Steve Manning. New ...

, or using a CMS framework such as

Drupal Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide ...

Wordpress WordPress (WP, or WordPress.org) is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, electronic mailing list, ma ...

, or web frameworks like Django). * WebOps includes front-end developers as key stakeholders In this sense, WebOps simply refers to

for

web applications A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

Responsibilities

Web operations teams are tasked with a variety of responsibilities, including: * The deployment of web applications * The monitoring, error isolation, escalation, and repair of problems * Performing

performance management Business performance management (BPM) (also known as corporate performance management (CPM) enterprise performance management (EPM),) is a management approach which encompasses a set of processes and analytical tools to ensure that a business o ...

availability In reliability engineering, the term availability has the following meanings: * The degree to which a system, subsystem or equipment is in a specified operable and committable state at the start of a mission, when the mission is called for at ...

reporting, and other administration * Configuring load-balancing and working with

content delivery network A content delivery network (CDN) or content distribution network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance ("speed") by distributing the service spat ...

s to improve the reliability and reduce the latency of the system * Measuring the impact of changes to content, applications, networks, and infrastructure Typically, web operations personnel are familiar with the

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are ...

stack, the

protocol,

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

page markup, and

Rich Internet application A Rich Internet Application (also known as a rich web application, RIA or installable Internet application) is a web application that has many of the characteristics of desktop application software. The concept is closely related to a single-page ...

s (RIAs) such as

AJAX Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * Ajax (play), ''Ajax'' (play), by the an ...

and the like.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Web Operations Computer occupations Information technology management