Companies may not be ready for DevOps at All!

DevOps is everywhere, its everybody talking about and like any hype has lots of people getting it so wrong. So DevOps is not a process, its not a tool its not a department is not a tool is not a specific technology. DevOps is about culture - how to you build and operate high scalable systems.  DevOps for me IMHO is a LEAN manifestation so its really needs be based on LEAN thinking and principles - At least i see this pattern a lot, lots of company that gets devops right are doing LEAN i dont think is a coincidence.  Unfortunately more and more companies are trying to make devops simple, easy, predictable and so scheduled, like in how many months and i be devops? 2 months?

The DevOps Team 

That`s the first and one of the most errors i see everywhere. You dont fix silos issues creating more silos - not at all. So before people might blame dev or might blame ops - but now people will blame the devops team so this is really just moving the problem to another place. Companies already have dev and already have ops so they need make this guys work together as a unit not as a shared structure everybody has.

Automation/Cloud 

It`s easy people associate devops with a set of technologies but thats not the case. Today automation is a must and makes lots of sense use a public cloud but however devops is a bigger concept than this and you can say you do because because you use amazon and have puppet or chef there. This is just modern ops with is valuable but is not enought.

Fragility

Architecture and software need do ant-fragile so thats it not just about a single technology but also related to several principles around how to build and operate more intelligent applications. Stuff like 12 Factor App could help you out. Thats require lots of maturity and it will require lots of care how you build and operate your apps - so this is very different for standard development most of companies do. Because they dont really care how they build software and this all gonna need change, how you log matters, how you expose configs matter and lots of other things.

Proper SOA / API Governance

SOA has a big role as well. Because you cant have a architecture that does not scala and dont provide flexibility so you will really need have SOA/Microservices/Apis thats is a must. Because that provides lots of flexibility and is not just have a service with a rest interface that way you design the interface matters(not in the REST purist discussion) but in sense of governance because there are ways you can avoid braking the consumers - there are ways that you can make your life easier or harder.

New Practices old Mindsets - Give me benefits with not change!

The reality is that everybody wants devops but people really dont want change, they all want benefits but they are okay to stick with new technology and practices like automation but companies are not there yet, several companies still have lots of waterfall and PMO doing very old management that dont creates quality and dont provide flexibility and speed for the business. So if you are not agile, could you be devops? Are you being DevOps or just using docker and doing Chef?

A long way ahead...

There are still lots of work that needs to be done at the market in general. Most of companies never got SOA and Agile right so moving to devops is actually more challenges and without changing mindsets is really hard. The good news is that  some companies got agile, got soa right and guess what they are doing devops properly - so this are driving forces pushing the others to improve.

Cheers,
Diego Pacheco

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