DevOps Elevator Pitch

Although DevOps is taking the world of IT by storm, it seems to be too often reduced to the use of some automation tool: the "I buy Puppet, I am DevOps" syndrome. There is also no standard definition for DevOps as the idea itself is still young. This leads to the term getting abused to an unprecedented level as a lot of people in the industry struggle to grasp the concept. I thought I would try to come up with some sort of elevator pitch for DevOps. 

First and foremost, DevOps is about increased cooperation between development and operations. This can't be bought off the shelf, this requires some effort, and in my opinion seems at first to contradict some ITIL principles and/or PCI compliance constraints. DevOps aims at stopping the tug of war between operations and development teams which have pretty much opposite goals. Ops want stability and Devs want to add new features... which might threaten stability. By the way, Development here refers to all teams participating in creating, testing and upgrading applications, not only coders.

Fostering cooperation between Dev and Ops is supported by technical components:

• Automation Engineering is a component of DevOps but not the only one. This is often the component that enterprise IT departments implement first using  Puppet/Chef/Ansible/Salt/etc. The purpose of automating is not so much about saving on labour costs but it is rather about improving consistency, security, agility and elasticity across an infrastructure
• Continuous feedback is provided by monitoring tools both open source (elk, sensu, nagios...) , closed source (Splunk, dynatrace...) or ad hoc reporting software. It is a crucial component of DevOps, you cannot run today's highly scalable and elastic infrastructures without proper feedback. It is also invaluable to the Business as they can quickly determine what does and doesn't work form their point of view
• Continuous Integration/Continuous deployment (Jenkins, Bamboo...) is about managing the life cycle of applications and reducing time to market. Continuous integration ideally includes automated testing and will combine with Automation Engineering for even more automation goodness

DevOps mainly comes from the world of highly scalable startups and web shops (Google, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook) and it is still a puzzle for more "established", dare I say legacy, IT departments. Nevertheless, it can be implemented and will provide outstanding value in the long run. It is also highly compatible with Agile principles which, by now, have been implemented by (almost) everyone.

Last advice, read The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim, George Spafford, and Kevin Behr. It is a highly accessible and enjoyable novel, not an obscure technical book.

Thank you for reading, this was a pretty slow elevator.

Image courtesy of opencliparts: https://openclipart.org/detail/192884/computer-handshake-1