[The DevOps Handbook] - Imagine a World Where Dev and Ops Become DevOps

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The work systems that enable developers to be more productive and get better outcomes. By adding the expertise of QA, IT Operations, and Infosec (Information security) into delivery teams and automated self-service tools and platforms, teams are able to use that expertise in their daily work without being dependent on other teams.

This enables organizations to create a safe system of work, where small teams are able to quickly and independently develop, test, and deploy code and value quickly, safely, securely, and reliably to customers. Maximize developer productivity, enable organizational learning, create high employee satisfaction, and win in the marketplace.

These are the outcomes that result from DevOps.

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And by 2010, with the introduction of DevOps and the neverending commoditization of hardware, software, and now the cloud, features (and even entire startup companies) could be created in weeks, quickly being deployed into production in just hours or minutes - for these organizations, deployment finally became routine and low risk. These organizations are able to perform experiments to test business ideas, discovering which ideas create the most value for customers and the organization as a whole, which are then further developed into features that can be rapidly and safely deployed into production.

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Learned Helplessness - Where people become unwilling or unable to act in a way that avoids the same problem in the future.

The Ethics of DevOps: There is a better way

Breaking the downward spiral with DevOps

Ideally, small teams of developers independently implement their features, validate their correctness in production-like environments, and have their code deployed into production quickly, safely and securely. Code deployments are routine and predictable. Instead of starting deployments at midnight on Friday and spending all weekend working to complete them, deployments occur throughout the business day when everyone is already in the office and without our customers even noticing - except when they see new features and bug fixes that delight them. And, by deploying code in the middle of the workday, for the first time in decades, IT Operations is working during normal business hours like everyone else.

By creating fast feedback loops at every steps of the process, everyone can immediately see the effects of their actions. Whenever changes are committed into version control, fast automated tests are run in production-like environments, giving continual assurance that the code and environments operate as designed and are always in a secure and deployable state.

Automated testing helps developers discover their mistakes quickly (usually within minutes), which enables faster fixes as well as genuine learning—learning that is impossible when mistakes are discovered six months later during integration testing, when memories and the link between cause and effect have long faded. Instead of accruing technical debt, problems are fixed as they are found, mobilizing the entire organization if needed, because global goals outweigh local goals.

Pervasive production telemetry in both our code and production environments ensure that problems are detected and corrected quickly, confirming that everything is working as intended and customers are getting value from the software we create.

blameless post-mortems - not to punish everyone, but to better understand what caused the accident and how to prevent it. This ritual reinforces our culture of learning.

Because we care about quality, we even inject faults into our production environment so we can learn how our system fails in a planned manner. We conduct planned exercises to practice large-scale failures, randomly kill processes and compute servers in production, and inject network latencies and other nefarious acts to ensure we grow ever more resilient. By doing this, we enable better resilience, as well as organizational learning and improvement.

In this world, everyone has ownership in their work, regardless of their role in the technology organization They have confidence that their work matters and is meaningfully contributing to organizational goals, proven by their low-stress work environment and their organization’s success in the marketplace. Their proof is that the organization is indeed winning in the marketplace.

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THE BUSINESS VALUE OF DEVOPS