Finding a Path to Confident DevOps

Confidence in any endeavour involves mastering basic skills and integrating those skills into advanced solutions. DevOps creates a cultural experience to transform existing organizations to deliver more value, sooner, and accelerate businesses.

My career started when I realized all the concepts I used as a successful intelligence officer were the same as those for success in this industry. In my book Confident DevOps, I shared my thoughts about these ideas with readers as well as the connection that inspired my motivation. I hope this book inspires similar transformations in you by emphasizing historical, technical solutions and the cultural formations for DevOps.

Too many new practitioners concentrate solely on technical solutions without understanding the history behind those actions. The basic understanding supports future growth and leads to non-traditional methods to improve business performance. These cultural practices lead to an understanding of the technological underpinnings of DevOps. The key to building connections emerges from context derived from architecture, observability, pipelines and testing. Good DevOps practices begin with an architecture that mirrors the organization or addresses the organizational challenges necessary for success. One critical factor is creating observability across pipelines and testing, enabling all individuals to understand what must happen. However, all the pipelines in the world can only help if one possesses the metrics outputs and describes potential outcomes.

Visualizing DevOps

It is not enough to state one has a process, confidence depends on communication, and diagramming can help. Once, a senior military officer told me that if I cannot summarize my ideas into a picture, I have not spent enough time evaluating the process. Since then, I’ve started routinely converting discussions into images. There are a lot of different DevOps structures out there, from pyramids to infinity loops, to circles and other solutions. An example is the one below.

When looking at this diagram, the horizontal bars establish the required lifecycle functions and the pillars represent the strategic connections. Further, you can use the horizontal bars’ relative size to depict how much process time each section requires for optimal performance.

As referenced in this Decode article, most business approaches spend about 26-44% of their time in the Design, Develop and Deploy phases, with the rest in Operations and Support. This mirrors the software development lifecycle. Success requires adhering to strategic principles such as the labelled Stability, Security, Adaptability and Scalability to be able to continue at those levels. Every software construction should remain stable in the wild, be reasonably secure, constructed for easy adaptation, and be scalable when needed. Carefully considering each approach allows thinking about what elements must be observed in each step to create success.

Other things to consider in DevOps

DevOps is not just the cultural mindset; it’s about building continuous connections through the contextual understanding of deliverables. Contextual understanding helps identify and remove blockers. To reach the next steps, one must strive to eliminate blockers by recognizing where these exist and understanding how each originated. Further, continuing in DevOps moves past the initial implementation to show how experiences shape teams. Experience, from externally enforced standards to internal perceptions, is critical in how teams and organizations collaborate over the long term.

Another aspect of DevOps to consider is the basics of critical thinking. Confidence is difficult if one lacks the supporting knowledge and the underlying understanding. A simple method relies on identifying knowledge, understanding the next steps and verifying any underlying assumptions. The first question confirms data is accurate and timely, the second looks for what to expect and the third ensures underlying assumptions are correct.

One key principle I always follow throughout the work is that you cannot begin advanced solutions until you understand the basics. As soccer players learn to dribble, pass and shoot before moving into advanced tactics, the same principle applies in DevOps. Whether you are a long-time practitioner or are new to DevOps, I hope Confident DevOps helps you accelerate your success.