What are
devops
It is said that if you ask 10 people about DevOps, you will get 12 answers. This is due to differences in opinions and expectations around DevOps, not to mention differences in its practices.
In order to decipher the paradox around DevOps, we found the person who knows it best-it is the top practitioner in the entire industry. These people are everywhere, understand the ins and outs of technology, and have practiced DevOps for many years. Their views should encourage, inspire and inspire your thoughts on DevOps.
What does DevOps mean to you?
Let's start with the basics. We are not looking for textbook answers, we want to know what the experts are saying.
In short, experts say that
DevOps is related to principles, practices and tools.
Ann Marie Fred, head of DevOps for IBM Digital Business Group's business platform, said: "For me, DevOps is a set of principles and practices designed to make the team more effective in designing, developing, delivering and operating software."
Red Hat Senior DevOps Evangelist Daniel Oh said: "Overall, DevOps has enabled companies to develop current IT-based processes and tools related to application development, IT operations and security protocols."
Brent Reed, the founder of Tactec Strategic Solutions, talked about the continuous improvement of stakeholders. "DevOps means to me a way of working, which includes a way of thinking that can continuously improve operational performance until it reaches organizational performance, thereby making stakeholders happy."
Many experts also emphasize culture. Ann Marie said: "It's also about continuous improvement and learning. It's about people and culture, and it's also about tools and technology."
For Dan Barker, Chief Architect and DevOps Director of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), "DevOps is mainly about culture... It combines lean, fair culture and continuous learning and other independent fields. . I think culture is the most critical and the most difficult to implement."
Chris Baynham-Hughes, Head of DevOps at Atos, said: "[DevOps] practices are adopted through the evolution of the organization's internal culture, processes, and tools. The focus is on cultural change, and the main tenant of DevOps culture is collaboration., experimentation, and quick feedback. And continuous improvement."
Cloud architect Geoff Purdy talked about agility and feedback "shorten and expand the feedback loop. We want the team to get feedback in minutes instead of weeks."
But in the end, Daniel nailed it by explaining how open source and open culture enabled him to "achieve his goals quickly and easily." In the DevOps plan, the most important thing for me should be an open culture instead of useful tools and multiple solutions."
Which DevOps practices have you found effective?
"Choose one, automatic configuration is very effective for my team."
The most effective practices cited by experts are everywhere but all-encompassing.
According to Ann Marie, "Some of the most powerful [practices] are agile project management; breaking cross-functional, autonomous squads; fully automatic continuous delivery; green/blue deployment for zero downtime; developers set themselves Monitoring and alerting; an indisputable post-mortem; automatic execution of security and compliance."
Chris said: "Special breakthroughs are compassionate collaboration; continuous improvement; open leadership; shortening the distance with the company; moving from a vertical silo to a horizontal, cross-functional product team; work visualization; impact mapping ; Mobius cycle; shortened feedback cycle; automation (from environment to CI/CD)."
Brent supports "an evolving learning culture, including TDD (Test Driven Development) and BDD (Behavior Driven Development) to capture stories and automatically implement the sequence of events from design, construction, testing to implementation and production, and conduct continuous integration. A failure-first testing method that automates the integration and delivery process and provides rapid feedback throughout the life cycle."
Geoff emphasized automatic configuration. "Choose one and automatic configuration is very effective for my team. More specifically, it is automatic configuration from a versioned infrastructure or code base."
Dan is funny. "We have done a lot of different things to create a DevOps culture. We held "lunch and study" activities through free food to encourage everyone to study together; we bought books and conducted group studies."
How do you motivate the team to achieve DevOps goals?
"Celebrate the victory and visualize the progress made."
Daniel emphasized "important automation. In order to minimize opposition from multiple teams in the DevOps plan, you should encourage your team to improve development, testing and IT operations, as well as the automation of new processes and processes. For example, Linux containers are the implementation of DevOps automation capabilities. Key tool."
Jeff agreed. He said: "Automate work. Do you have tasks that you hate to do? Great. If possible, get rid of them. Otherwise, automate them. As the work continues to evolve, it makes the work no longer It becomes boring and routine."
Dan, Ann Marie and Brent emphasize the motivation of the team.
Dan said: "At NAIC, we have an excellent reward system to encourage specific behaviors. We have multiple rewards. Anyone can reward two of them to anyone. After completing important tasks, we also reward the team. , But we often reward individual contributors."
According to Ann Marie, “The biggest motivation for my team is to see the success of others. We have a replay every week, part of which is to share the knowledge we have learned from trying new tools or practices. I am passionate about what I do and are willing to help others get started. More teams will join soon."
Brent agreed. "It is essential that everyone has the same knowledge training... I want to first evaluate how to help the team achieve (and) deliver products with product owners and users."
Chris suggests two approaches. "The small goals to be achieved each week are important, and the team believes it is important, and can see progress beyond the functional work being done in [place]. Celebrate the victory and visualize the progress made."
How do DevOps and Agile work together?
"DevOps! = Agile, second agile! = Scrum."
This is an important question, because DevOps and agile are both cornerstones of modern software development.
DevOps is a software development process that focuses on communication and collaboration to facilitate rapid application and product deployment, while agile is a development method that involves continuous development, continuous iteration, and continuous testing to achieve predictable quality and deliverables.
So how do they connect? Let us ask the experts.
In Brent's view, "DevOps! = Agile, the second Agile! = Scrum... How do the agile tools and working methods that support DevOps strategies and goals integrate with each other."
Chris said: "Agile to me is a fundamental part of DevOps. Of course, we can talk about how to adopt DevOps culture in a non-agile environment, but in the end, improving the agility of software design methods is a key indicator of agility. . The maturity of adopting DevOps within the organization."
Dan connects DevOps to the larger agile manifesto. "In order to set a benchmark, I never talked about agile instead of citing the agile manifesto. There are many implementations that do not focus on the manifesto. When you read the manifesto, they actually describe DevOps from a development perspective. Therefore, integrating agile into the DevOps culture is very important Easy, because Agile focuses on communication, collaboration, flexibility of change, and rapid production."
Geoff believes that "DevOps is one of many implementations of agile. Agile is essentially a set of principles, and DevOps is the culture, process, and tool chain that embody these principles."
Ann Marie kept it simple, saying: "Agile is a prerequisite for DevOps. DevOps makes Agile more effective."
Does DevOps benefit from open source?
"Doing well with open source requires a DevOps culture."
This question was strongly opposed by all participants, and then explained the benefits they saw.
Ann Marie said: "We will stand on the shoulders of giants and continue to develop on the existing basis. Maintaining the open source model of the software, including pull requests and code reviews, is also very effective for DevOps teams."
Chris agrees that DevOps will undoubtedly benefit from open source. "From engineering and tools (such as Ansible) to process and people, it is carried out by sharing stories in the industry and open leadership communities."
One benefit cited by Geoff is "Grassroots adoption. No one has to sign a free purchase requisition (such as beer). After the team finds a tool that meets their needs, they can freely (such as freely) modify it, and then build on it. Build. and contribute to the entire community. Rinse, repeat."
Daniel said that open source shows DevOps "a better way to make new changes and overcome challenges, just like open source software developers are doing."
Brent agreed. "DevOps has gained a lot of benefits from open source. One way is to use tools to understand how they can help accelerate the ability of DevOps goals and strategies. Automating, virtualization and containerization, scaling and many qualities for developers and operators, while It will be difficult to achieve without introducing the technical support that makes DevOps easier."
Dan pointed out the two-way symbiotic relationship between DevOps and open source. "Doing well open source requires a DevOps culture. Most open source projects have a very open communication structure and are rarely ambiguous. This is actually a learning opportunity for DevOps practitioners to revolve around what they may bring into their own organization. In addition, being able to use Tools in a community similar to your own organization will only encourage your own cultural development. I like to use GitLab as an example of this symbiotic relationship. When I introduced [GitLab] to the company, we got a great tool, But what I really want to buy is their unique culture, which brings great value through the ability to interact with them and give back. Their tools also provide a lot of things for DevOps organizations, but their culture inspires the company's spirit of awe Where I introduce it.
