Values associated with DevOps

DevOps can be split into various pillars when it comes to transformation. That being said, if you wanted to take a high-level view of DevOps rather than one at a deeper level, you can talk about DevOps as four specific buckets.

These buckets are as follows:

• Culture
• People
• Process
• Technology

I firmly believe the order of these matters. While the ambition may be to work on tooling first, following the order set out here will ensure your organizations get much more value from their DevOps transformation.

Important note

Culture is one of the most important aspects of a successful DevOps transformation, even above the use of technology.

The importance of culture in DevOps cannot be overstated; getting the right culture in your organization enables you to drive in the right direction and get more value later in the transformation. You should also not underestimate the challenge of changing an organization's culture – it requires drive and executive-level support to be successful.

Next is people, the lifeblood of any business and any product. You must ensure that you have the right people to get the right culture to achieve the goals that have been set out by your organization, and those people must have the right skills to achieve this. As important as executive-level support is to DevOps, so is having the right people to execute it.

Now, we have process. The right-minded people will be the ones who can work with and drive your processes in the right direction, applying appropriate techniques to ensure your processes are fit for purpose in a DevOps world. To work together, you need to adopt some processes for continuous collaboration, such as plan, develop, release, and monitor. Finally, you need the ability to repeat those processes on demand to deliver maximum value.

Finally, technology. By this point, the work you have undertaken in your DevOps transformation should have gained incredible value for your organization, but by introducing technology, you can add yet more value. Through automation tools, your processes can now be run on demand, more frequently, and, importantly, with a level of idempotency. This means that results with the same input parameters should not change over time. This is the value automation brings over human execution.

In this section, we have looked at the values that make DevOps successful. Now that we understand what it means to implement DevOps, we will understand the challenges that DevOps will solve in our organization.