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Kindle Notes & Highlights
DevOps is as much about culture as it is about tools, and culture is all about people.
Culture, as an abstract collection of ideas and behaviors, is hard to pin down to a proscriptive set of requirements.
Traditionally siloed technical teams interact through complex ticketing systems and ritualistic request procedures, which may require director-level intervention. A team taking a more DevOps approach talks about the product throughout its lifecycle, discussing requirements, features, schedules, resources, and whatever else might come up. The focus is on the product, not building fiefdoms and amassing political power.
The people who are empowered to directly make an improvement are the ones who are alerted to the defect.
Likewise, your team is incentivized around your core goal: creating an awesome product for your customers, whatever that product happens to be. Development isn’t rewarded for writing lots of code. Operations isn’t punished when all that code doesn’t run as expected in production. The team is rewarded when the product is awesome, and shares in the improvement process when the product could be more awesome.
Trust is a massive component of achieving a DevOps culture. Operations must trust that Development is doing what they are because it’s the best plan for the success of the product. Development must trust that QA isn’t really just there to sabotage their successes. The Product Manager trusts that Operations is going to give objective feedback and metrics after the next deployment. If any one part of the team doesn’t trust another part of the team, your tools won’t matter. Additionally, if you don’t trust the people who work for you, why are they working there? Why are you?
People come with baggage: preconceived notions, past experiences, prejudices.
The one question you must ask is “What is our primary business goal?”
Articulating upfront what your goals are will help you with other phases of your DevOps roll out.
Reduce time-to-market for new features. Increase overall availability of the product. Reduce the time it takes to deploy a software release. Increase the percentage of defects detected in testing before production release. Make more efficient use of hardware infrastructure. Provide performance and user feedback to the product manager in a more timely manner.
Your new DevOps-style standup meeting includes everyone. Your developers, your QA engineers, your system administrators, all of them get together to discuss what they’re working on.
