DevOps … whats your definition?

Its 2019… a good number of organizations have matured on their journey on “DevOps” but still there are few who are struggling with the question on “What is DevOps?” – is it just automation? Or is it about process optimization?? Or is it just a change in the ways of working??? Additionally, there are new terms emerging terms like- “NoOps”, “DevSecOps”, “SecOps”, etc, etc…what is important is how organizations define DevOps and run this as a transformation program in their organization.

While there are discussions on associating DevOps with Cloud as well, but what matters is whether the “People” in your organization understand what exactly does DevOps mean to them. I have been working with multiple customers for a long time and I have observed that each one of them had their own way of defining DevOps, lets take a look at few of them-

a. DevOps is redefining service delivery, for example- setting up infrastructure took 2-3 weeks, it should be delivered within half a day. This is where Cloud adoption (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc) has taken a steep growth and customers are adopting IaaC priniciples – Infrastructure as a Code using tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, etc. The focus is Self Servicing.

b. DevOps is about automating continuous delivery pipeline, for example – applications that were manually deployed across different environments like Dev, Test, Staging, PreProd and Prod are now automated using tools like UrbanCodeDeploy, CA Automic, XL Deploy, etc

c. DevOps is about Collaboration, for example – the development, testing and operations teams worked in their own worlds, had multiple approval gates to move things from one end to another, developers are not aware of how applications are deployed in production and operation teams are not involved during application architecture designing. DevOps adoption demands a change in team structure, empowering teams, members working collaboratively with one vision – delivering quality product in small sprints and making customers happy.

In all of the above cases… what you observe is that the basic foundation to setup DevOps are the “teams – people”, they need to adopt automation, that need to optimize processes, practice agile and work together as “One Team“. And this possible when the organization defines DevOps and its relevance to their ecosystem, run Organization Change Management (OCM) programs to spread a common message on what and why DevOps.

So, whats your definition of DevOps???