In recent years, DevOps has dominated the IT world. It’s all over the blogosphere, DevOps Days are being held in cities all over the world and their are countless articles and presentations available on the subject. I myself am guilty of more than a few blogs on the subject. So when a blog comes along that looks at DevOps with a new approach (at least new to me) than it’s worth sharing. This article by Mitchell Hashimoto on InfoQ is based on his recent presentation at DevOpsDays in Sweden.
The Wide Range of DevOps
DevOps claims to create a faster feedback loop and lower the cost of product iteration all while improving the overall stability of your systems. Like anything making impressive claims, it was easy to ignore or dismiss the movement due to immaturity or lack of evidence. But time has passed, companies have continued to show real-world gains, and various processes for adopting DevOps in organizations have emerged. Therefore, the time has never been better to investigate and bring this movement into your own work environment.
For the uninitiated, it’s easy to view DevOps as a single change, much like a single switch controls the power to a light. Looking at it this way, adopting such a change can seem like a daunting — perhaps impossible — task. And just like general engineering, trying to build something complex as a single unit of change typically results in failure. Luckily, DevOps isn’t a single switch, and it can be broken down into a series of changes. The deployment and timing of these changes can be tightly controlled and fine-tuned based on what is right for your organization.
Conveniently, the changes necessary for DevOps can be plotted on a timeline-style graph, where the extreme left represents traditional ops culture and practices, and the right represents a newer DevOps-style. In this view of the world, the question is not “Is your company practicing DevOps?” but instead is the more accurate “How strong of a DevOps culture has your company adopted?”
This is only a small excerpt of Mitchell’s article. Click here for the full article and to learn about the necessary steps to move forward without putting too much at risk.