A DevOps Journey

There is a significant amount of papers, presentations and books about DevOps out there. The majority of professional have understood that as Mike Dilworth, Agile and DevOps transformation lead, said:

DevOps is a culture, not a role! The whole company needs to be doing DevOps for it to work.

Bridging the gap between an increasing velocity in software development and a need for security and reliability on operations side is when DevOps emerged, emphasizing on people and culture. Devops culture has a strong focus on improving collaboration between operations and development teams, about aligning mindset to find the balance between speed and reliability.

When reading about how mid-large companies have implemented DevOps, the majority, when looking back, realize that a key and necessary factor was indeed culture and values. Many have shared their 3-5 core DevOps values, sometime strategic reasons why they went on a DevOps journey, sometimes key things they have or are focusing on. As an example, Google in this video where they compare the role of DevOps and SRE, list 5 focus areas: reduce organization silos (share ownership), Accept failure as normal, implement gradual change, leverage tooling and automation and measure everything.

When starting a DevOps transformation, after clarifying the business case, nextstep is to define DevOps for your organization. To me, it is the most important part of the journey as it addresses 4 very important points:

• People and Culture
• Vision and inspiration
• Leadership
• Change management

Defining the core values of your DevOps culture is critical in my opinion as I have seen over time a clear relation between successful or effective transformation and living through the core values.

If you took a DevOps journey, what have been your Devops core values?