Deep Thought: An intro to a series of blogs on DevOps

DevOps is certainly a term that has got the e-grapevines chattering hasn’t it. It seems every company, person and their dog is currently invested in DevOps. And yet for all the noise and buzz, 3 key questions still keep popping up:

1. What, actually, is DevOps?
2. How do we implement it into our organisation?
3. What exactly are we supposed to get as benefits from this?

I recently gave a talk in London at a Meet Up session on DevOps, and in the 30 minutes prior to the event start, I must have been asked at least one of those questions by every person I had the chance to talk to there. It kind of opened my eyes a little. For all the expert analysis and excited fervour to get on board, not many out there seemed to have actually taken the time sit back and really think about DevOps means, that is, to quote the "Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, "once you know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means".

The cynic in me sees that DevOps has often been taken up as a marketing ploy, an opportunity to push the sale of this technology or that service. Be careful. The truth is that it is a genuine huge step forward in the way we develop and manage IT within the business.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be going over each of the questions above and hopefully shedding a little light on each, something to hopefully allow you to see why you should think carefully, and strategically invest in only what you want, not what others tell you that you need. So watch this space as I explore the meaning of Life(cycle), DevOps & Everything. Otherwise when you ask at the end, “Well, how much better is my organisation operating?”, you could get the response, “42!”