What Are the Core Functions and Evolution of Modern IT Operations?

Operations Work Classification

Internet operations focus on service‑centered stability, security, and efficiency to ensure 24/7 high‑quality service for users.

Operations engineers strengthen infrastructure, conduct daily inspections, optimize architecture, improve disaster recovery, and use monitoring and log analysis to quickly detect and respond to faults, reducing downtime and meeting availability targets.

Security responsibilities include network segmentation, ACL management, traffic analysis, DDoS defense, OS and open‑source vulnerability patching, application‑level XSS and SQL injection protection, code scanning, permission audits, intrusion detection, and risk control to safeguard data and resist attacks.

Efficiency measures involve IO optimization for databases, image compression to reduce bandwidth, and tool platforms that accelerate product release and internal workflow.

System Operations

IDC Data Center Construction

Collect business requirements, assess scale, network layout, space, connectivity, and security to select and build data centers, handling construction and on‑site maintenance.

Network Construction

Design and plan production network architectures (data‑center, transport, CDN) and perform daily network tuning.

LVS Load Balancing and SNAT

Build load‑balancing clusters based on traffic and business needs, providing high‑performance, high‑availability routing and centralized public‑network access.

CDN Planning and Construction

Manage third‑party and self‑built CDN selection, node deployment, monitoring, fault handling, and acceleration strategy formulation.

Server Selection, Delivery, and Maintenance

Test and select servers, reduce power consumption, increase rack density, promote new hardware, diagnose hardware faults, and develop health‑check tools.

OS and Kernel Management

Select, customize, and optimize OS and kernel, manage patches, YUM repositories, and handle OS‑related incidents.

Asset Management

Record and manage physical resources (data centers, networks, cabinets, servers, ACLs, IPs) and provide APIs for automation.

Basic Service Construction

Design highly available DNS, NTP, SYSLOG services to avoid single points of failure.

Application Operations

Design Review

Participate in product design reviews to ensure high‑availability requirements are met.

Service Management

Define upgrade, rollback plans, monitor service health, set stability metrics, improve monitoring accuracy, and respond promptly to incidents.

Resource Management

Manage server assets, assess capacity, and allocate resources according to service needs.

Routine Inspection

Define and execute regular service checks, investigate and eliminate hidden risks.

Plan Management

Set thresholds for monitoring metrics, create and update response plans, and conduct periodic drills.

Data Backup

Establish backup strategies, ensure data availability, and perform regular recovery tests.

Database Operations

Design Review

Contribute DBA perspectives on storage, schema, indexing, and SQL standards during product design.

Capacity Planning

Monitor database capacity limits, identify bottlenecks, and optimize or scale before reaching limits.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Define backup and DR strategies, regularly test restores, and ensure data integrity.

Database Monitoring

Implement health and performance monitoring to detect issues early.

Database Security

Establish account controls, limit permissions, manage offline backups, and prevent data leaks.

High Availability & Performance Optimization

Design failover solutions, continuously optimize hardware, storage, filesystem, and SQL to handle more traffic without significant cost increase.

Automation System Development

Build automated deployment, scaling, sharding, permission, backup, SQL review, and failover capabilities.

Operations R&D

Operations Platform

Record services and relationships, provide APIs for automated tasks such as machine management, domain handling, traffic switching, and emergency plans.

Monitoring System

Design and develop monitoring for servers, network devices, and business metrics, improving alert timeliness, accuracy, and intelligence.

Automation Deployment System

Develop deployment automation, manage data and permissions, and deliver PaaS‑style high‑availability platforms.

Operations Security

Security Policy Establishment

Create practical security policies aligned with internal processes.

Security Training

Provide targeted training and assessments, establishing security responsibility roles.

Risk Assessment

Conduct black‑box and white‑box testing to evaluate risks across network, servers, applications, and data.

Security Construction

Strengthen weak points, deploy security devices, apply patches, encrypt or anonymize data, and regularly delete sensitive information.

Security Compliance

Handle external compliance requirements such as payment licensing.

Emergency Response

Maintain a security alert system, coordinate issue remediation, impact assessment, and post‑incident analysis.

Evolution of Operations Work

Early teams handled data‑center construction, basic networking, and server provisioning with minimal online service management.

As products matured, teams added server monitoring, LVS/Nginx layer operations, and manual service changes, using basic open‑source tools.

Growth led to separation into system and application operations, introducing backup, monitoring, and batch tooling, while addressing disaster recovery and risk.

Further scaling required platform management to standardize processes, enforce checks, and reduce manual errors.

Finally, self‑scheduling systems abstracted servers as containers, enabling dynamic scaling, automated fault handling, and early involvement of operations in product design.

The goal throughout is full automation, reduced manual effort, lower knowledge transfer cost, and proactive, system‑driven resilience.