Hello Readers, we are continuing our series on the Devops Handbook Summary. In this post and the next one, we will discuss the introduction to the book. It is divided into two parts. In this one, we will discuss the issues that were prevalent before the adoption of DevOps principles and practices and in the next one we will discuss the ways in which the problems are solved by the adoption of DevOps Principles

Dev + Ops = DevOps

In the new IT world, following the adoption of DevOps methodologies and principles, the product owners, Dev, QA, Ops and Infosec teams work together to eventually help the entire organization succeed by enabling fast flow of planned into production while achieving world-class stability, reliability, availability and security. The teams are cross-functional who rigorously test their hypotheses of which features will most delight users and move forward with providing those features. The focus is both on implementing user features and also ensuring smooth flow of work through the value stream without any chaos and disruption to any part of the organization

When QA, IT Ops and Infosec expertise are added to the delivery team, along with self-service tools and platforms, the teams are able to perform their daily work without depending on other teams.

When the above happens, small teams are able to quickly and independently develop, test and deploy code quickly, safely, securely and reliably and provide value to customers

Thus we get the desired outcomes of the adoption of DevOps which are:

• Maximized developer productivity
• Organizational Learning
• High Employee Satisfaction
• Winning in the Marketplace

Let's look at an analogy to understand the potential of the DevOps principles and practices. In the 1980s, there was a revolution in the manufacturing sector. This was due to the adoption of the Lean principles and practices. The manufacturing organizations improved in the following aspects: plant productivity, shorter customer lead times, product quality and customer satisfaction, all of which helped in winning at the marketplace

Before the revolution, the average manufacturing plant order lead times were six weeks. By mid 2000s this became less than three weeks. Those organizations which did not adopt Lean went out of business.

Similarly, the bar in delivering tech products and services has been raised. During 1970s and 1980s new features were developed and deployed with anywhere between 1 to 5 years. In the 2000s, due to advances in technology and adoption of Agile principles the time for the above activity dropped to months By 2010, with the introduction of DevOps and other advancements in hardware, software, cloud etc. features could be deployed into production in hours or minutes. Those organizations that are able to achieve the above said are able to perform experiments to best biz. ideas then find out the ones that create most value for the customers and then develop then as features and deploy them fast and safe. And if an organization is unable to generate these outcomes they risk going out of business like the manufacturing organaizations that didn't adopt Lean principles. Irrespective of the industry, technology or the technology value stream is absolutely needed to acquire clients and deliver value to them.

Now lets look at the symptoms of the problem, the reason behind it and why the problem could worsen without timely intervention Before we look at the symptoms lets see the problem: the conflict between Development and IT Operations or Ops in short. The most important result of this is increasing amount of technical debt

The term was first coined by Ward Cunningham. This is the result of the competing goals of these two parts which are:

• Respond to the rapidly changing competitive landscape

• Provide stable, reliable and secure service to the customer

The Development part takes the responsibility for the first and Ops for the second.

A similar conflict in the manufacturing world was termed as "the core chronic conflict" by Dr Eliyahu Goldratt.

This conflict is so powerful it prevents organizations from achieving business goals inside and outside the organization like a downward spiral.

Three stages of the Downward Spiral

The first stage starts in IT Operations where the goal is to keep the apps and infrastructure running to deliver value to the customers In many organizations, the most fragile complex and poorly documented apps and infra support the most revenue generating systems which we promise to fix when we have a little more time which is never had. When we try to bring changes to these, those activities fail and the promises made to our customers go for a toss.

This paves the way for the second stage when a new shiny feature is promised to compensate the failure that happened earlier without knowing the constraints of technology or proper analysis of the above failure. Then the cycle begins again resulting in further technical debt.

Then the third stage kicks in where communication gets slower, more approvals are in place, longer working hours all of which ultimately slow the achievement of the business goals.

Why does this Downward Spiral Happen Everywhere

The answer lies in following two statements:

First, every IT organanization has two opposing goals Second, Every company is a technology company

No matter which industry any company operates, the second statement holds good for it.

The Costs: Human and Economic

Lets look at the human cost, When people are trapped in the abovesaid downward spiral it creates in them a sense of helplessness, fear of failure, fatigue, cyncism, long working hours, working on weekends, decrease quality of life for them and in turn their families and thus leading to losing the valuable people.

Coming on to the Economic front, the opportunity cost is mind boggling according to the surveys by IDC and Gartner which approximate the value to be in the range of 520 billion dollars.(2011 estimates)

If through the adoption of Devops principles and practices, we could create half the value, it would be a huge success.

In the next article, we will see briefly how DevOps adoption could resolve the stated problems.