Maintaining a constant thirst for learning is essential for anyone dedicating their career to the IT, computer and networking industries. It’s more than just learning about the latest technologies, rather, it’s imperative we embrace new methodologies and paradigms for doing work, thinking about problems and creating solutions. Enter DevOps, which is a healthy mix of all the above.

You might find things a bit confusing if you’re new to DevOps. There are many perspectives on what it means. For myself, there were two significant milestones on my journey to understand and embrace DevOps;  1) rethinking how we design large, dynamic applications and manage the underlying infrastructure in cloud environments such as Amazon AWS, and 2) reading the book The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford.

At first blush, I thought DevOps suffered the “definition bloat” of so many other industry buzzwords (for example, “cloud” comes to mind.) Depending on who you talked to or what you read, DevOps definitions frequently encompassed one or more of the following:

1. embedding development resources within business units for better alignment and reduced cycle time,
2. high frequency software releases into production (multiple per day, hour, etc.)
3. automating infrastructure and system administration tasks vs manual provisioning and sysadmin
4. embedding operations functions within development organizations
5. operations performed by developer, even doing away with traditional operations in some cases

If these seem like a somewhat confusing, loosely assembled list is ideas, don’t fret — they struck me the same way at first too. These ideas actually fit very well together around a few core ideas essential to DevOps.

Quicker Time To Value – Being Fast and Agile

DevOps is about changing traditional paradigms, enabling us to more rapidly deliver production updates, new capabilities and improved operations. Outcomes include reducing software releases from months to multiple, micro releases per day, and even hours. To do this requires much more than can be achieved through traditional operational efficiencies. It requires tight alignment, coordination and execution by product, development and operations functions. Embedding multiple disciplines together helps gain this alignment, shorten communication paths, setting priorities quicker, enabling lightning fast coordination. DevOps promotes new practices like embedding development and operations functions within other parts of the business, breaking down long standing barriers between IT / Ops and development / business groups.

Automated Provisioning, Operations and SysAdmin

From app development to infrastructure operations, DevOps is about automation. DevOps is about faster software testing and integration, quality improvement, and working in much more dynamic and rapidly changing operating environments. For example, rather than building system images by hand (stick built), automation is used to rapidly generate and spin up new virtual environments on a small or large scale. Systems wake up, check in to learn their personality, install, configure or update code (OS, database, web server, application code revs, etc) and join the network dynamically. This can occur with a single instance or with hundreds simultaneously. Initial upgrades and feature updates can occur on smaller or isolated sections of the network, then are rapidly rolled out across the network, and rolled back quickly if necessary. Sysadmins, be they developers or ops people, use scripts, code and automation tools to manage much larger environments than would ever be possible using manual methods. Automation is an essential differentiator in any DevOps environment.

Culture of Open Collaboration, Communication and Failing Fast

DevOps breaks down silos and places a premium on collaboration and communications amongst all players involved. It’s no longer us vs. them or this department vs. that other department. The blame game is gone and the focus is on making work happen, and fast. Communication lines are drastically shortened and conflicts in chains of command are collapsed. It’s about how “we” get things done, no longer about what “they” didn’t do. Failures are viewed much differently. Failures happen and from them we learn and develop newer, better, more innovative solutions to solving problems and prevention problems in the future. Because of the speed DevOps can bring, recovery from failure is much quicker. If a new release into production is causing issues, we quickly flip back to a previous known-good version running on other virtual instances. Updates can also be rolled out much more quickly.

I hope these and coming views on DevOps are valuable to you as a reader. I know our conversation will help me and the teams I work with, as we learn and grow our expertise in DevOps. Please share your ideas, disagreements and learnings as we move along this journey together into the fast moving and quickly changing world of DevOps.