Information Technology Reference
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8.4 DevOps Values and Principles
DevOps can be divided into roughly four main areas of practice (
Kartar 2010
)
:
• Relationships
• Integration
• Automation
• Continuous improvement
8.4.1 Relationships
In a traditional environment, the tools and scripts are seen as the primary focus of opera-
tional maintenance. DevOps gives more weight to the relationships among the teams and
the various roles in the organization. Developers, release managers, sysadmins, and man-
agers—allneedtobeinclosecoordinationtoachievethesharedgoalofhighlyreliableand
continuously improving services.
Relationships are so important in a DevOps environment that a common motto is
“People over process over tools.” Once the right people are performing the right process
consistently, only then does one create a tool to automate the function. One of the key de-
fining principles of DevOps is the focus on people and process over writing a script and
then figuring out who should run it and when.
8.4.2 Integration
Part of breaking down silos is ensuring that processes are integrated across teams. Rather
than seeing operational duties as merely following a script, in a DevOps environment one
viewsthemasend-to-endprocessesthatcombinetoolsanddatawithpeopleprocessessuch
as peer reviews or coordination meetings. Processes must be linked across domains of re-
sponsibility to deliver end-to-end functionality.
Integration of the communities responsible for different parts of the service operation is
also a given for DevOps. A quick way to assess the DevOps culture in your environment
might be to ask sysadmins who they have lunch with regularly. If the answer is “Mostly
sysadmins,” and hardly ever folks from software development, web operations, network-
ing, or security, this is a sign that integration of teams has not been achieved.
8.4.3 Automation
Under the auspices of automation, DevOps strives for simplicity and repeatability. Config-
urations and scripts are handled as source code and kept under version control. Building
andmanagementofthesourcecodearescriptedtothefullestextentpossibleoncetheentire
process is understood.
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