Where is DevOps?
Few years ago, I was traveling with my 2 year old niece on a rainy day. I told her “Look, such a beautiful weather” and prompt came a question I was not prepared for.. “Where is weather?”
Fast forward to world of devops, everybody is talking about it, everybody is either learning it or training devops, including myself, yet we can’t seem to find it, or can we?
As an executive, I like to think of a problem a tool, technology or a process will help me resolve.
I follow similar approach for devops, alright if it is a culture and not just tools or automation or no-ops, I really like to know what problems it will help me solve for my organization and for my customers.
As a trainer and consultant I often visit and interact with customers in various domains, ranging from information technology to manufacturing to financial institutions to retail et al. And one thing I’ve noticed is that a tool, technology or process is as good as it is used and understood by its adopters. For instance, I saw waterfall working perfectly fine for an organization for past 40 years, and they have absolutely no reason to change it. DevOps and Agile failing so miserably in another organization that they went to a release cycle of one year. And something that I have seen quite frequently in past 18 months, organizations moving to cloud, only to return to their original platform of choice, after burning hands on security, cost, maintenance etc.
So, if you are bitten by devops bug, find out first where you want to use it. What problem(s) it is going to solve for you, your people, products and/or services?
If you already have devops going on, find out how it is being measured. Is it yielding result as expected or is it making no impact at all. Remember that if something cannot be measured, it cannot be managed and devops is no exception. There are tons of metrics to be measured for all use cases.
I will be writing a series of articles on devops in coming weeks. Stay tuned…