Patrick Debois from Belgium is the actual culprit to blame for the term Devops, he wanted more synergy between developers and operations back in 2007.
Fast-forward a few years and now we have “Devops” everywhere we go. If you using the coolest tools in town such as Kubernetes, Azure Devops Pipelines, Jenkins, Grafana etc – then you probably reckon that you are heavy into Devops. This can not be further from the truth.
The fact is that Devops is more about a set of patterns and practices within a culture that nurtures shared responsibilities across all teams during the software development life-cycle.
Put it this way, if you only have 1 dude in your team that is “doing Devops”, then you may want to consider if you are really implementing Devops or one of it’s anti-patterns. Ultimately you need to invest in everyone within the SDLC teams to get on board with the cultural shift.
If we cannot get the majority of engineers involved in the SDLC to share responsibilities, then we have failed at our objectives regarding Devops, even if we using the latest cool tools from Prometheus to AKS/GKE. In a recent project that I was engaged in there was only 1 devops dude, when he fell ill nobody from any of the other engineering teams could perform his duties. Despite the fact that confluence has numerous playbooks and “How To’s”. Why?
It comes down to people, process & culture. All of which can be remedied with strong technical leadership and encouraging your engineers to work with the process and tools in their daily routine. Hence why I encourage developers that are hosting their code on Kubernetes to use Minikube on their laptops.
If there is any advice that I can provide teams that want to implement Devops – Focus on People then Process and finally the Tools.
In order to setup the transition for success – we will discuss in the next part of this series the pillars of Devops.
Romiko Derbynew 