Successful, long-lasting movement have a clear manifesto outlining goals and principles. Many DevOps adopters may not be aware of the DevOps Manifesto (created by Jez Humble @jezhumble) nor how successful DevOps requires keeping a clear focus on principles, practices, and value (instead of infrastructure tooling.
DevOps Principles
DevOps value is derived in the core principles that started the movement:
- Iterative
- Incremental
- Continuous
- Automated
- Self-service
- Collaborative
- Holistic
Teams should analyze existing processes against the principles, and see where DevOps practices can add value.
DevOps Practices
A few identified DevOps practices include:
- Self-service configuration
- Automated provisioning
- Continuous build
- Continuous integration
- Continuous delivery
- Automated release management
- Incremental testing
DevOps Tool Capabilities
As Mike (@madgreek65) and Abel (G+AbelAvram) mention, teams commonly focus on tools instead of value. DevOps friendly tooling delivers:
- Self service project via project configuration portals
- Policy configuration for Security, service levels, frameworks, usage, topology concerns
- Automated platform provisioning via service tier templates, frameworks, and policy enforcement points (PEP)
- Process automation with Continuous build, test, and deployment. Code promotion and synchronization across environments and servers
- Dependency analysis and impact analysis
DevOps Value
For value metrics, break up DevOps goals into foundational, optimal, and transformational categories. For example:
Foundation
- Time and effort to create new application environment
- Time to redeploy application
- Time to promote application into a new lifecycle phase
Optimize
- Dynamically right-size infrastructure scale
- Re-use existing platform services and business services from resource pool instead of re-building solution stack
Transformation
- Time and effort required integrating business process, event processor – creating a complex app.
- Time and effort required to apply policy across tenant(s)
- Cost to operate application per user or transaction
Keep a DevOps Focus
So look beyond adding the cool ‘DevOps Engineer’ title and tool names (i.e. Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and Salt) onto your resume. DevOps is about principles, practices, and creating a collaborative environment that improves software delivery and increases business value. With good information readily available on the Web, and conference series (for example, DevOpDays ) focused on core DevOps principles and practices, you can stay tuned into the DevOps way of thinking!
Feature Image Courtesy of DevOpsDays.org
| Reference: | DevOps Equals DevOps Principles Plus DevOps Practices from our JCG partner Chris Haddad at the IT Business Navigation Charts blog. |
