DevOps Culture - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 171

DevOps is not just about developers and system administrators. In his blog post
“DevOps is not a technology problem. DevOps is a business problem,” Damon Edwards
( 2010 ) emphasizes that DevOps is about collaboration and optimization across the whole
organization. DevOps expands to help the process from idea to customer. It isn't just about
leveraging cool new tools. In fact, it's not just about software.
The organizational changes involved in creating a DevOps environment are best under-
stood in contrast to the traditional software development approach. The DevOps approach
evolved because of the drawbacks of such methods when developing custom web applica-
tions or cloud service offerings, and the need to meet the higher availability requirements
of these environments.
8.1.1 The Traditional Approach
For software packages sold in shrink-wrapped packages at computer stores or downloaded
over the Internet, the developer is finished when the software is complete and ships. Oper-
ational concerns directly affect only the customer; the developer is far removed from the
operations. At best, operational problems may be fed back to the developer in the form of
bug reports or requests for enhancement. But developers are not directly affected by oper-
ational issues caused by their code.
Traditional software development uses the waterfall methodology , where each
step—gather requirements, design, implement, test, verify, and deploy—is done by a dif-
ferent team, each in isolation from the other steps. Each step (team) produces a deliverable
to be handed off to the next step (team).
This is called “waterfall development” because the steps look like a cascading waterfall
(see Figure 8.1 ). Information flows down, like the water.