DevOps Driving School - Explaining DevOps in 5 Minutes

DevOps is not a title, not a box to buy, nor a software to install - how can you explain DevOps in 5 minutes, e.g. as an elevator pitch riding up to the top floor with your boss?

DevOps is like a driving license for running code in production

In my opinion, this is the easiest and best explanation, that everybody can understand. Specifically, it is like a motorcycle driving license and this analogy carries surprisingly far, e.g.:

  • motorcyclists pass a theoretical exam → Engineers should know about their obligations before working in production

  • motorcyclists drive on their own, the instructor drives behind and gives instructions via radio → Engineers should work in production and a DevOps coach should accompany them with expertise

  • motorcyclists are fully accountable for their mistakes (e.g. hitting a tree) while they learn driving → Engineers working in production are fully accountable for their mistakes, e.g. opening a database to the internet

  • ... and so on

It is important to note, that DevOps is - in the end - the result of doing the right things. To make it simple to check your "DevOps adoption", I created these 5 DevOps Principles which serve criteria or key performance indicators (KPI) against which you can measure your own progress:

  • … if every person uses the same tool for the same job

  • … codified knowledge - everybody contributing their part to common automation

  • … if all people have the same privileges in their tooling

  • … if human error is equally possible for Dev and Ops

  • … replacing people interfaces by automated decisions and processes

Doing all of these topics properly will yield DevOps as a result. See 5 DevOps Principles Homepage for more resources, talks, slides and videos.

It is important to keep in mind that DevOps solves primarily a people problem, and not a tech problem. You can even keep using your existing tech stack and achieve DevOps if you treat all Engineers equally.

Watch my DevOps Driving School 5 minute lightning talk (download slides) for my version of this elevator pitch:

I gave this talk at the 46th BLN DevOps Meetup on May 30th, 2024. Sadly my talk was the only DevOps-specific talk at this event, which maybe also shows a little bit the decline of DevOps as a hot topic. In my observation however, DevOps is still very much a thing, and many organisations or companies still struggle with getting DevOps done right.

Are you interested in learning more about the topic of transformation in your company, or how to establish Platform Engineering? Together with my colleagues from Tektit Consulting I'll be happy to support you with your personal DevOps, GitOps, Platform Engineering or transformation journey!

Comments

Post a Comment

Like this content? You could send me something from my Amazon Wishlist. Need commercial support? Contact me for Consulting Services.

Popular posts from this blog

Overriding / Patching Linux System Serial Number

Image
I'm a big fan of test driven development  (TDD) for infrastructure components. I'm currently working on a hardware-related topic where we also use the system serial number as identifier. To create a proper integration test, we need to be able to start a system and set the serial number to a known value. This can easily be done with the help of virtual machines like in VMware or VirtualBox , but I couldn't find a way for changing the system serial number on hardware boxes, cloud VMs (e.g. on Alibaba Cloud) or other Linux system. Problem Analysis I was thinking: Linux is the operating system where I can potentially do everything . So how hard can this be? After some digging around I found out that there are those main sources for the serial number on Linux: /sys/firmware/dmi/tables/DMI contains a binary blob of Desktop Management Interface data provided by the kernel and the dmidecode utility is commonly used to decode
Read more

A Login Security Architecture Without Passwords

Image
Following up on Lifting the Curse of Static Credentials and Eliminating the Password of Shared Accounts , I have many discussions about why we would benefit from removing password prompts for website logins. Let's dig deeper into the details and show why removing password prompts leads to a  safer security architecture . Update 11.03.2022: Added more details about business vs. consumer websites and additional security suggestions surrounding WebAuthn Problem Space For context, imagine a website that needs to identify online users via their email address. We assume that the website in question is not the primary email system of a user but some other website, e.g. an e-commerce shop system or a collaborative productivity tool. As a User As a user of that website I want to easily sign up for an account have an easy way to login into the account be sure that my account is protected from others or attacks be able to easily recover access to my account i
Read more

WARNING is a waste of my time

Image
How many log levels do you know? How many log levels are actually useful? At Relax and Recover we had an interesting discussion about the use of the WARNING log level. I suddenly realized that in a world of automation, I need only two log levels: ERROR and everthing else. ERROR means that I as a human should take action. Everything else is irrelevant for me. So far for the user side. As a programmer the choice of log level is sometimes much more difficult. As a programmer I might not want to decide for the user if some problem is an ERROR or not. The obvious solution is to issue a WARNING in an attempt to shed the responsibility of making a decision. But in an automated world that does not help me as an admin to run the software better. WARNINGS for most cases only create extra manual work because somebody needs to go and check some log file and decide if there actually is a problem. I would rather have the software make that decision and I would be happy to fix or readjus
Read more