The season of DevOps is upon us, if not only related to widespread adoption, then certainly in terms of industry emphasis.
This week, at the CA World ’16 conference, my colleagues and I will be interacting with thousands of practitioners, all of whom have evolving DevOps narratives. Meanwhile, CA was a founding sponsor of the AllDayDevOps conference, held earlier this week, attracting more than 12,000 registered attendees worldwide.
These events come on the heels of a successful DevOps Enterprise Summit held last week in San Francisco, where many of the industry’s brightest minds gathered to discuss and debate the current state of play. If activity is a reliable indicator of relevance, the growing noise around DevOps adoption has been amplified into a deafening roar.
All of this stands as further evidence that DevOps is no longer an emerging phenomenon, but rather a ubiquitous movement transforming the manner in which nearly every organization builds and operates software.
As a result, the DevOps movement is finally ready to move from initial framing of emerging techniques into the domain of defining best practices. Yet, at the same time, given the fluid nature of DevOps itself and its unique correlation with the individual needs of every business and environment, even this notion of best practices is one that mandates flexibility.
Increasingly, we hear leading experts in the field espouse the need for these practices, but those that serve as “guardrails” that set useful parameters for DevOps adoption and refinement rather than concrete guidelines that dictate specific requirements.
Such is the tone and goal of the new book that my co-authors Kieran Taylor, Peter Waterhouse and I released this week to help practitioners understand common DevOps challenges, methods and milestones.
Titled “DevOps for Digital Leaders,” the book examines the genesis and increasing maturity of DevOps, all with the explicit intention of helping to inform further refinement among today’s organizations. After reading it, I’d argue that any practitioner, from total neophytes to hardened DevOps vets, should walk away with a greater understanding of how to bring today’s best practices to bear within their own work.
Beyond looking at precisely how DevOps has grown in response and parallel to use of agile methodologies in the world of manufacturing thereby transforming the modern software factory, the book offers specific examples of leading adopters that are using these techniques, and related tooling, to re-engineer the very DNA of their business.
From the core competencies of building, testing and deploying applications to continuous monitoring and management of software to help stay attuned to changing customer expectations, we sought to offer a practical guide to DevOps transformation. Other chapters touch on finer points related to key topics including creation of success metrics and measurement of ROI.
In one of the analogies invoked throughout the book, we highlight how DevOps-empowered software factories are not unlike the engineering, design and race day teams present in the world of today’s Formula One racing series.
Pushing themselves and constantly innovating on the fly—clawing for every second in the name of winning the overall title—the comparison fits nicely as we watch this season’s contenders fight it out down to the final race in Abu Dhabi later this month. As with winning customers in today’s applications economy, clearly every little bit counts.
Again, no matter what—or how much—you think you know about DevOps, we’d like to think that there are tactical “learnings” sprinkled throughout the book that will broaden and deepen your understanding.
Download your copy today, and let us help drive you down the road to victory. Alternatively, you can order a hard copy of the book via Amazon, with all proceeds being donated by the authors to fund Foundation for Excellence, which provides STEM scholarships to children in India.
