What is DevOps?
What Isn’t DevOps?
Before I define DevOps, let’s get started with what DevOps isn’t. DevOps isn’t just a title, or a guy, or a department. DevOps isn’t just automating everying, and isn’t just logging everything. DevOps isn’t dozens of alerts every day, and isn’t an on-call rotation. DevOps isn’t agile or small releases. DevOps is a mindset.
What Is DevOps?
The best definition I’ve seen is from Donovan Brown, “DevOps is the union of People, Processes, and Products to continuously deliver value to our end users”. Donovan breaks down his word choice and what it means to him. To me, DevOps is a mindset that should be adopted company wide. Because of delivering value to our end users, you need a Production-First mindset. It’s not about delivering story points, delivering user stories, or deploying to qa.
Half Measures
Have you ever been at a company that “Bought the Agile”? Doing Standups and Sprints but not understanding the why behind it. Agile is a promise of more work from fewer people, right? Have you ever heard,”Why are we doing retrospectives, that’s not a feature”.
DevOps can be the same way. Perform a number of actions and activities but not adopt the mindset. Why are we automating things? Why and what should we log or alert on? How do we use this data or improve our processes and products?
