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

by Gene Kim

Peter Drucker, a leader in the development of management education, observed that “little fish learn to be big fish in little ponds.”

“Traditional managers will often object to hiring engineers with generalist skill sets, arguing that they are more expensive and that ‘I can hire two server administrators for every multi-skilled operations engineer.’”

Dev often complains about Ops being afraid to deploy code. But in this case, when given the power to deploy their own code, developers became just as afraid to perform code deployments.

Instead of putting our expertise into Word documents, we need to transform these documented standards and processes, which encompass the sum of our organizational learnings and knowledge, into an executable form that makes them easier to reuse. One of the best ways we can make this knowledge re-usable is by putting it into a centralized source code repository, making the tool available for everyone to search and use.

Standards should be implemented in software: as CI/CD pipelines, automated tests, etc. Those are more useful than Word documents.