The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

by Gene Kim

Instead of IT Operations doing manual work that comes from work tickets, it enables developer productivity through APIs and self-serviced platforms that create environments, test and deploy code, monitor and display production telemetry, and so forth.

the product is the platform that developers use to safely, quickly, and securely test, deploy, and run their IT services in production.

by any developer.

our goal is to enable small teams of developers to independently develop, test, and deploy value to customers quickly and reliably,

High performers, regardless of whether an engineer is in Development, QA, Ops, or Infosec, state that their goal is to help maximize developer productivity.

we don’t want to create specialists who are “frozen in time,” only understanding and able to contribute to that one area of the value stream.

Services must be decoupled from other services and, just as important, from shared databases

Our goal is to enable market-oriented outcomes where many small teams can quickly and independently deliver value to the customer.

One way to enable market-oriented outcomes is for Operations to create a set of centralized platforms and tooling services that any Dev team can use to become more productive,

In almost all cases, we will not mandate that internal teams use these platforms and services—these platform teams will have to win over and satisfy their internal customers, sometimes even competing with external vendors. By creating this effective internal marketplace of capabilities, we help ensure that the platforms and services we create are the easiest and most appealing choice available (the path of least resistance).

Ideally, we make life so much easier for Dev teams that they will overwhelmingly decide that using our platform is the easiest, safest, and most secure means to get their applications into production.

Creating and maintaining these platforms and tools is real product development—the customers of our platform aren’t our external customer but our internal Dev teams. Like creating any great product, creating great platforms that everyone loves doesn’t happen by accident. An internal platform team with poor customer focus will likely create tools that everyone will hate and quickly abandon for other alternatives, whether for another internal platform team or an external vendor.

It’s okay for people to be dependent on our tools, but it’s important that they don’t become dependent on us.”

In general, taking something that’s already working somewhere and expanding its usage is far more likely to succeed than building these capabilities from scratch.§