What is DevOps?
If you have been working in IT for the last few years you probably have heard of the term DevOps at some point. But what is this DevOps thing? Is it just another buzzword, or is there more to it?
The word DevOps is a portmanteau of development and operations. The word itself was popularized through a series of “DevOps Days” starting in 2009 in Belgium. The aim of DevOps is to help an organization rapidly produce software products and services.
As with many new buzzwords, there are always different opinions about what the buzzword is, or means.
But a good definition from our perspective is this:
“DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support.” [4]
DevOps has strong affinities with Agile and Lean approaches. The old view of operations tended towards the “Dev” side being the “makers” and the “Ops” side being the “people that deal with the creation after its birth” – the realization of the harm that has been done in the industry of those two being treated as siloed concerns is the core driver behind DevOps.[4]
In this way, DevOps can be implemented as an outgrowth of Agile – agile software development prescribes close collaboration of customers, product management, developers, and (sometimes) QA to fill in the gaps and rapidly iterate towards a better product – DevOps says “yes, but service delivery and how the app and systems interact are a fundamental part of the value proposition to the client as well, and so the product team needs to include those concerns as a top level item.”[4]
From this perspective, DevOps is simply extending Agile principles beyond the boundaries of “the code” to the entire delivered service. [4]
The adoption of DevOps is being driven by factors such as:
- Use of agile and other development processes and methodologies
- Demand for an increased rate of production releases from application and business unit stakeholders
- Wide availability of virtualized and cloud infrastructure from internal and external providers
- Increased usage of data center automation and configuration management tools
Notable DevOps tools:
Survey data from the 2014 State of DevOps [3] report shows:
- Strong IT performance is a competitive advantage. Firms with high-performing IT organizations were twice as likely to exceed their profitability, market share and productivity goals.
- DevOps practices improve IT performance. IT performance strongly correlates with well-known DevOps practices such as use of version control and continuous delivery. The longer an organization has implemented — and continues to improve upon — DevOps practices, the better it performs. And better IT performance correlates to higher performance for the entire organization.
- Organizational culture matters. Organizational culture is one of the strongest predictors of both IT performance and overall performance of the organization. High-trust organizations encourage good information flow, cross-functional collaboration, shared responsibilities, learning from failures and new ideas; they are also the most likely to perform at a high level. These cultural practices and norms found in high-trust organizations are also at the heart of DevOps, which helps explain why DevOps practices correlate so strongly with high organizational performance.
- Job satisfaction is the No. 1 predictor of organizational performance. We all know how job satisfaction feels: It’s about doing work that’s challenging and meaningful, and being empowered to exercise our skills and judgment. We also know that where there’s job satisfaction, employees bring the best of themselves to work: their engagement, their creativity and their strongest thinking. That makes for more innovation in any area of the business, including IT.
DevOps podcast – a recommendation
If you wan’t to know more about DevOps, a good place to start is the DevOps Cafe podcast.
The DevOps Cafe is a podcast with John Willis (VP of Customer Enablement at StatelessNetworks) & Damon Edwards (Founder, Customer Development SimplifyOps)
The podcasts usually features DevOps evangelists, and one of the more recent podcasts features Adrian Cockcroft (of Netflix fame). The discussions on the podcast are usually about how the featured people are working with DevOps, and what their thoughts about the DevOps movement are.
DevOps Cafe
References:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps
- Top 11 Things You Need To Know About DevOps – Gene Kim (http://itrevolution.com/11devops/)
- 2014 DevOps Report (Puppet Labs http://puppetlabs.com/2014-devops-report)
- the agile admin – What Is DevOps? http://theagileadmin.com/what-is-devops/
