I was giving a talk on DevOps recently and one of the questions from a person in the audience was how to get others to buy in. This person also had complaints that “DevOps” wouldn’t work because their boss wasn’t interested.
I think these are great examples of things that many developers and managers don’t think about when they look to embrace DevOps. While there is no shortage of technical articles and videos on how to introduce automation or deliver features in a new way, what gets lost is the need for cultural change.
DevOps is all about people. It’s about learning to trust each other and work together. It’s about adapting and changing how you write or deploy code to make the process smoother. It’s about sharing your knowledge with others and learning from them. It’s about being blameless and also accountable. It’s about support from management to improve the software and the process.
It’s about people.
The automation is cool and it’s a lot of what is easy to demo and explain. I show that because I don’t know the people involved in your environment and I can’t explain how you can get them to change how they work. Instead, we tend to focus on the tangible things that an individual can learn: the technology. Use version control, validate and test with CI, deploy consistently with release servers, and build packages that are versioned and reviewed. Those are the easy parts.
The culture is what really matters, both in development teams, in conjunction with ops teams, and with support for management. There is no magic to software development and DevOps doesn’t bring any. All it helps you understand is that you need to be a team to build great software.
Steve Jones
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