The DevOps Handbook Quotes

“By the 2000’s, because of advances in technology and the adoption of Agile principles and practices, the time required to develop new functionality had dropped to weeks or months, but deploying into production would still require weeks or months, often with catastrophic outcomes.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“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.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“DevOps practices can be made compatible with ITIL process. However, to support the shorter lead times and higher deployment frequencies associated with DevOps, many areas of the ITIL processes become fully automated, solving many problems associated with the configuration and release management processes (e.g., keeping the configuration management database and definitive software libraries up to date).”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“By adding the expertise of QA, IT Operations, and Infosec into delivery teams and automated self-service tools and platforms, teams are able to use that expertise in their daily work without being dependent on other teams.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Improving flow through the technology value stream is essential to achieving DevOps outcomes. We do this by making work visible, limiting WIP, reducing batch sizes and the number of handoffs, continually identifying and evaluating our constraints, and eliminating hardships in our daily work.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“While the foundation of DevOps can be seen as being derived from Lean, the Theory of Constraints, and the Toyota Kata movement, many also view DevOps as the logical continuation of the Agile software journey that began in 2001.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“THE PROBLEM: SOMETHING IN YOUR ORGANIZATION MUST NEED IMPROVEMENT (OR YOU WOULDN’T BE READING THIS BOOK)”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“A lot of what drives me and others working in this space is the knowledge that, whatever your constraints, we can always do better, and the desire to help people on their journey.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Don’t fight stupid, make more awesome.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“As Tom Limoncelli describes, “When I was at Google, we had one official compiled language, one official scripting language, and one official UI language. Yes, other languages were supported in some way or another, but sticking with ‘the big three’ meant support libraries, tools, and an easier way to find collaborators.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“In his book, he states that the value of having a single repository for an entire organization is so powerful it is difficult to even explain.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“A firm-wide, shared source code repository is one of the most powerful mechanisms used to integrate local discoveries across the entire organization.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“During the meeting and the subsequent resolution, we should explicitly disallow the phrases “would have” or “could have,” as they are counterfactual statements that result from our human tendency to create possible alternatives to events that have already occurred.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“human error is not our cause of troubles; instead, human error is a consequence of the design of the tools that we gave them.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“CONTINUALLY IDENTIFY AND ELEVATE OUR CONSTRAINTS To reduce lead times and increase throughput, we need to continually identify our system’s constraints and improve its work capacity. In Beyond the Goal, Dr. Goldratt states, “In any value stream, there is always a direction of flow, and there is always one and only one constraint; any improvement not made at that constraint is an illusion.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Every industry and company that is not bringing software to the core of their business will be disrupted.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“When new learnings are discovered locally, there must also be some mechanism to enable the rest of the organization to use and benefit from that knowledge.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Make infrastructure easier to rebuild than to repair”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Instead of merely documenting the specifications of the production environment in a document or on a wiki page, we create a common build mechanism that creates all of our environments, such as for development, test, and production. By doing this, anyone can get production-like environments in minutes, without opening up a ticket, let alone having to wait week.s”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Another way we can enable more market-oriented outcomes is by enabling product teams to become more self-sufficient by embedding Operations engineers within them, thus reducing their reliance on centralized Operations.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“limit on [team] size ... ensures the team has a clear, shared understanding of the system they are working on. As teams get larger, the amount of communication required for everybody to know what's going on scales in a combinatorial fashion.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“By choosing carefully where and how to start, we are able to experiment and learn in areas of our organization that create value without jeopardizing the rest of the organization. By doing this, we build our base of support, earn the right to expand the use of DevOps in our organization, and gain the recognition and gratitude of an ever-larger constituency.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“When new learnings are discovered locally, there must also be some mechanism to enable the rest of the organization to use and benefit from that knowledge into explicit, codified knowledge, which becomes someone else's expertise through practice.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“To mitigate these types of problems, we strive to reduce the number of handoffs, either by automating significant portions of the work or be reorganizing teams so they can deliver value to the customer themselves, instead of having to be constantly dependent on others.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“The result is world-class quality, reliability, stability, and security at ever lower cost and effort; and accelerated flow and reliability throughout the technology value stream, including Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, and InfoSec.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Because we care about quality, we even inject faults into our production environment so we can learn how our system fails in a planned manner.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Instead of project teams where developers are reassigned and shuffled around after each release, never receiving feedback on their work, we keep teams intact so they can keep iterating and improving, using those leanings to better achieve their goals.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“Automated testing helps developers discover their mistakes quickly (usually within minutes), which enables faster fixes as well as genuine learning-learning that is impossible when mistakes are discovered six months later during integration testing, when memories and the link between cause and effect have long faded. Instead of accruing technical debt, problems are fixed as they are found, mobilizing the entire organization if needed, because global goals outweigh local goals.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“When Dev teams had problems with testing or deployment, they needed more than just technology or environments. What they also needed was help and coaching. At first, we embedded Ops engineers and architects into each of the Dev teams, but there simply weren’t enough Ops engineers to cover that many teams. We were able to help more teams with what we called an Ops liaison model and with fewer people.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“DevOps astonishingly enables us to simultaneously improve organizational performance, achieve the goals of all the various functional technology roles (e.g., Development, QA, IT Operations, Infosec), and improve the human condition.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations