The DevOps Handbook Quotes

“In high-performing organizations, everyone within the team shares a common goal—quality, availability, and security aren’t the responsibility of individual departments, but are a part of everyone’s job, every day.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Ask a programmer to review ten lines of code, he’ll find ten issues. Ask him to do five hundred lines, and he’ll say it looks good.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“high performance starts with organizations whose leadership focuses on building an environment where people from different backgrounds and with different identities, experiences, and perspectives can feel psychologically safe working together, and where teams are given the necessary resources, capacity, and encouragement to experiment and learn together in a safe and systematic way.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations

“DevOps benefits all of us in the technology value stream, whether we are Dev, Ops, QA, Infosec, Product Owners, or customers. It brings joy back to developing great products, with fewer death marches. It enables humane work conditions with fewer weekends worked and fewer missed holidays with our loved ones. It enables teams to work together to survive, learn, thrive, delight our customers, and help our organization succeed.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations

“DevOps requires potentially new cultural and management norms and changes in our technical practices and architecture. This requires a coalition that spans business leadership, Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, Information Security, and even Marketing, where many technology initiatives originate. When all these teams work together, we can create a safe system of work, enabling small teams to quickly and independently develop and validate code that can be safely deployed to customers. This results in maximizing developer productivity, organizational learning, high employee satisfaction, and the ability to win in the marketplace.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations

“Cagan notes that when organizations do not pay their “20% tax,” technical debt will increase to the point where an organization inevitably spends all of its cycles paying down technical debt.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“However, interrupting technology workers is easy, because the consequences are invisible to almost everyone, even though the negative impact to productivity may be far greater than in manufacturing. For instance, an engineer assigned to multiple projects must switch between tasks, incurring all the costs of having to re-establish context, as well as cognitive rules and goals.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“In typical DevOps transformations, as we progress from deployment lead times measured in months or quarters to lead times measured in minutes, the constraint usually follows this progression: Environment creation: We cannot achieve deployments on-demand if we always have to wait weeks or months for production or test environments. The countermeasure is to create environments that are on demand and completely self-serviced, so that they are always available when we need them. Code deployment: We cannot achieve deployments on demand if each of our production code deployments take weeks or months to perform (i.e., each deployment requires 1,300 manual, error-prone steps, involving up to three hundred engineers). The countermeasure is to automate our deployments as much as possible, with the goal of being completely automated so they can be done self-service by any developer. Test setup and run: We cannot achieve deployments on demand if every code deployment requires two weeks to set up our test environments and data sets, and another four weeks to manually execute all our regression tests. The countermeasure is to automate our tests so we can execute deployments safely and to parallelize them so the test rate can keep up with our code development rate. Overly tight architecture: We cannot achieve deployments on demand if overly tight architecture means that every time we want to make a code change we have to send our engineers to scores of committee meetings in order to get permission to make our changes. Our countermeasure is to create more loosely-coupled architecture so that changes can be made safely and with more autonomy, increasing developer productivity.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Many psychologists assert that creating systems that cause feelings of powerlessness is one of the most damaging things we can do to fellow human beings—we deprive other people of their ability to control their own outcomes and even create a culture where people are afraid to do the right thing because of fear of punishment, failure, or jeopardizing their livelihood”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“integrating the objectives of QA and Operations into everyone's daily work reduces firefighting, hardship, and toil, while making people more productive and increasing joy in the work we do.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Broadly speaking, to acheive DevOps outcomes, we need to reduce the effects of functional orientation ("optimizing for cost") and enable market orientation ("optimizing for speed") so we can have many small teams working safely and independently, quickly delivering value to the customer”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Organizations which design systems ...are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of the organizations.. the larger an organization is, the less flexibility it has and the more pronounced the phenomenon”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Bill Baker, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, quipped that we used to treat servers like pets: “You name them and when they get sick, you nurse them back to health. [Now] servers are [treated] like cattle. You number them and when they get sick, you shoot them.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“However, interrupting technology workers is easy, because the consequences are invisible to almost everyone, even though the negative impact to productivity may be far greater than in manufacturing.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“By relentless and constant experimentation in their daily work, they were able to continually increase capacity, often without adding any new equipment or hiring more people.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“It’s difficult to overstate the enormity of this problem—it affects every organization, independent of the industry we operate in, the size of our organization, whether we are profit or non-profit. Now more than ever, how technology work is managed and performed predicts whether our organizations will win in the marketplace, or even survive.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Every company is a technology company, regardless of what business they think they’re in. A bank is just an IT company with a banking license.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“management hints that the person guilty of committing the error will be punished. They then create more processes and approvals to prevent the error from happening again.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“The leader helps coach the person conducting the experiment with questions that may include: •What was your last step and what happened? •What did you learn? •What is your condition now? •What is your next target condition? •What obstacle are you working on now? •What is your next step? •What is your expected outcome? •When can we check?”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations

“(….) when Marketing and Sales over-promise, this puts a lot of stress on the whole
relationship. Or when HR keeps hiring the wrong people or bonuses are misaligned.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook, Second Edition: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations

“Since the term was first coined, I’ve settled on my own definition of “DevOps”: everything you do to overcome the friction between silos. All the rest is plain engineering.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook, Second Edition: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations

“working in small batches (the First Way), fast feedback and monitoring (the Second Way), and a generative culture (the Third Way).”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations

“The Third Way enables the creation of a generative, high-trust culture that supports a dynamic, disciplined, and scientific approach to experimentation and risk-taking, facilitating the creation of organizational learning, both from our successes and failures.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations

“technology value stream as the process required to convert a business hypothesis into a technology-enabled service or feature that delivers value to the customer.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations

“increase the success of DevOps initiatives,”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations

“how to properly integrate security and compliance”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations

“Three Ways: Flow, Feedback, and Continual Learning”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations

“Part V describes how we accelerate continual learning and experimentation by establishing a just culture, converting local discoveries into global improvements,”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations

“Part IV discusses how to accelerate and amplify feedback by creating effective production telemetry to see and solve problems, better anticipate problems and achieve goals,”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations

“Part III describes how to accelerate flow by building the foundations of our deployment pipeline: enabling fast and effective automated testing, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and architecting for low-risk releases.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations