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Chapter 8. DevOps Culture
The opposite of DevOps is despair.
—Gene Kim
This chapter is about the culture and set of practices known as “ DevOps .” In a DevOps or-
ganization, software developers and operational engineers work together as one team that
shares responsibility for a web site or service. This is in contrast to organizations where
developers and operational personnel work independently and often with conflicting goals.
DevOps is the modern way to run web services.
DevOps combines some cultural and attitude shifts with some common-sense processes.
Originally based on applying Agile methodology to operations, the result is a streamlined
set of principles and processes that can create reliable services.
Appendix B will make the case that cloud or distributed computing was the inevitable
result of the economics of hardware. DevOps is the inevitable result of needing to do effi-
cient operations in such an environment.
If hardware and software are sufficiently fault tolerant, the remaining problems are hu-
man. The seminal paper “Why Do Internet Services Fail, and What Can Be Done about It?”
byOppenheimer etal.( 2003 ) raised awareness thatifwebservices aretobeasuccess inthe
future, operational aspects must improve:
We find that (1) operator error is the largest single cause of failures in two of the three
services, (2) operator errors often take a long time to repair, (3) configuration errors
are the largest category of operator errors, (4) failures in custom-written front-end
software are significant, and (5) more extensive online testing and more thoroughly
exposing and detecting component failures would reduce failure rates in at least one
service.
In other words, technology has become so reliable that the remaining problems are in the
processes used to manage it. We need better practices.
The canonical way to improve large-scale operations is through “quality management”
techniquessuchasW.EdwardsDeming's“Shewhartcycle”( Deming2000 )or“LeanManu-
facturing” ( Spear&Bowen1999 ).DevOps'skeyprinciples areanapplication ofthese prin-
ciples to web system administration. The topic The Phoenix Project ( Kim, Behr & Spafford
2013 ) explains these principles in the form of a fictional story about a team that learns these
principles as they reform a failing IT organization.
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