Foreword

Having discussed DevOps with Mikael Krief on several occasions, it is clear that he understands the importance of empowering both Dev and Ops in order to deliver value.

DevOps is the union of people, processes, and products to enable the continuous delivery of value to our end users. Value is the most important word of that definition. DevOps is not about software, automation, shipping a feature, or getting to the bottom of your product backlog. It is about delivering value. To deliver value, you must measure your application while it is running in production and use the telemetry to guide what you deliver next. To deliver value, your team must fully embrace the culture of DevOps.

The hardest part of DevOps is the people part: building the culture that is required to succeed. Learning DevOps does a great job of focusing on the culture behind DevOps. To succeed, you must change the way your team thinks about their roles. Everyone must have a common goal that encourages collaboration. Delivering value to the end user is the responsibility of everyone involved in the application.

Our community tends to spend more time on the Dev side of DevOps. Learning DevOps, however, has invested considerable time on Infrastructure as Code. As more workloads move to the cloud, IaC becomes more valuable. The ability to provision and configure your infrastructure as part of your pipeline allows engineers to innovate. IaC can save companies money by shutting down environments when they are no longer in use or simply provisioning them on demand. Once your entire infrastructure is stored in version control and acted upon via your pipeline, recovering from a disaster is simply a deployment.

The time to debate whether you should or should not implement DevOps is over. You either implement DevOps or you lose.

Donovan Brown

Principal Cloud Advocate Manager at Microsoft