We have come to the end of a detailed exploration of both the principles and technical practices of DevOps. At a time when every technology leader is challenged with enabling security, reliability, and agility, and at a time when security breaches, time to market, and massive technology transformation is taking place, DevOps offers a solution. Hopefully, this book has provided an in-depth understanding of the problem and a road map to creating relevant solutions.
As we have explored throughout The DevOps Handbook, we know that, left unmanaged, an inherent conflict can exist between Development and Operations that creates ever-worsening problems,which results in slower time to market for new products and features, poor quality, increased outages and technical debt, reduced engineering productivity, as well as increased employee dissatisfaction and burnout.
DevOps principles and patterns enable us to break this core, chronic conflict. After reading this book, we hope you see how a DevOps transformation can enable the creation of dynamic learning organizations, achieving the amazing outcomes of fast flow and world-class reliability and security, as well as increased competitiveness and employee satisfaction.
DevOps requires potentially new cultural and management norms, and changes in our technical practices and architecture. This requires a coalition that spans business leadership, Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, Information Security, and even Marketing, where many technology initiatives originate. When all these teams work together, we can create a safe system of work, enabling small teams to quickly and independently develop and validate code that can be safely deployed to customers. This results in maximizing developer productivity, organizational learning, high employee satisfaction, and the ability to win in the marketplace.
Our goal in writing this book was to sufficiently codify DevOps principles and practices so that the amazing outcomes achieved within the DevOps community could be replicated by others. We hope to accelerate the adoption of DevOps initiatives and support their successful implementations while lowering the activation energy required for them to be completed.
We know the dangers of postponing improvements and settling for daily work-arounds, as well as the difficulties of changing how we prioritize and perform our daily work. Furthermore, we understand the risks and effort required to get organizations to embrace a different way of working, as well as the perception that DevOps is another passing fad, soon to replaced by the next buzzword.
We assert that DevOps is transformational to how we perform technology work, just as Lean forever transformed how manufacturing work was performed in the 1980s. Those that adopt DevOps will win in the marketplace, at the expense of those that do not. They will create energized and continually learning organizations that out-perform and out-innovate their competitors.
Because of this, DevOps is not just a technology imperative, but also an organizational imperative. The bottom line is, DevOps is applicable and relevant to any and all organizations that must increase flow of planned work through the technology organization, while maintaining quality, reliability, and security for our customers.
Our call to action is this: no matter what role you play in your organization, start finding people around you who want to change how work is performed. Show this book to others and create a coalition of like-minded thinkers to break out of the downward spiral. Ask organizational leaders to support these efforts, or, better yet, sponsor and lead these efforts yourself.
Finally, since you’ve made it this far, we have a dirty secret to reveal. In many of our case studies, following the achievement of the breakthrough results presented, many of the change agents were promoted—but, in some cases, there was later a change of leadership which resulted in many of the people involved leaving, accompanied by a rolling back of the organizational changes they had created.
We believe it’s important not to be cynical about this possibility. The people involved in these transformations knew up front that what they were doing had a high chance of failure, and they did it anyway. In doing so, perhaps most importantly, they inspired the rest of us by showing us what can be done. Innovation is impossible without risk taking, and if you haven’t managed to upset at least some people in management, you’re probably not trying hard enough. Don’t let your organization’s immune system deter or distract you from your vision. As Jesse Robbins, previously “master of disaster” at Amazon, likes to say, “Don’t fight stupid, make more awesome.”
DevOps benefits all of us in the technology value stream, whether we are Dev, Ops, QA, Infosec, Product Owners, or customers. It brings joy back to developing great products, with fewer death marches. It enables humane work conditions with fewer weekends and missed holidays with our loved ones. It enables teams to work together to survive, learn, thrive, delight our customers, and help our organization succeed.
We sincerely hope The DevOps Handbook helps you achieve these goals.