Monday, May 07, 2018

DevOps concepts and learning path

As Jez Humble said at leading a devops transformation DevOps is:
A cross-functional community of practice dedicated to the study of buildings, evolving and operating rapidly changing, secure, resilient system at scale. 
DevOps includes and enhance the ideas of the Agile Software Development giving a more end to end vision of the value stream for a technology-based company. And, you know, Every Company Is A Tech Company.




In summary, I think that DevOps should be the core of any technology-based company and the only option to reach/pursue the necessary business agility.


Main characteristics of DevOps culture:

  • Collaboration between development and operations (avoiding SILOs and conflicting goals).
  • Organize around the value stream optimizing for the flow efficiency (not resource efficiency). Learning to work in small batches.
  • Remove waste (Non-Value Adding Activities).  Of course, we talk about value from the customer point of view.
  • Build quality in.
  • Create fast feedback loops.
  • Maximize organizational learning (making safe to fail and learn).



Common practices:

  • Infrastructure as code.
  • Developers are involved in operations of the system (you build it, you run it).
  • Operations involved in the development from the beginning (introducing/facilitating specific, nonfunctional requirements to create a system easy to operate and monitor).
  • Automation (to avoid errors and to facilitate short iterations).
  • Continuous Delivery.

Books / Learning path:


If you are interested in learning about this culture and you like reading books, this is the learning path I recommend:


 

The Phoenix project: As a great and easy to read an introduction to Lean in an IT environment. (My review)


 

 The DevOps handbook: The complement for The Phonix Project that explains step by step the typical practices and the strategy to introduce DevOps. A short of practitioner’s guide.


 

Continuous Delivery: To learn the principles and technical practices that enable rapid and incremental delivery of high-quality, valuable software to our customers.




Accelerate: To understand how to build and scale high performing technology organizations creating this DevOps culture. This book is also an analysis of the data from the State of DevOps reports that give an idea about the importance of these practices.






 

 

 

Team Topologies: To have a common vocabulary and organize the different types of teams that suit the business needs. The recommended team organizations try to optimize for end to end flow.




If you are involved in any technology company, do you a favor and learn about DevOps... As the State of DevOps report indicates is the key to be a high-performance organization.


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