Introduction to DevOps/SRE Culture

Introduction to DevOps/SRE Culture

Introduction

Peter Drucker quoted "Culture eats strategy for breakfast". He is considered to have laid the philosophical and practical foundation of modern enterprise. The quote is a warning to leaders that unless organization's culture is aligned with the strategy,the implementation of any plan is destined for failure.

DevOps/SRE Culture

How it Started?

Back in the day, it was just Developers and Operations folks. The developers, the brains behind cool stuff, would wrap their developed product and toss it them to the operations team. Any issue in deployment, maintenance and day-to-day operations was considered "operations" problem.

This method worked when developers were developing using "the waterfall approach" for development, where the releases were done only after a year or so.

"Agile development methodology" was adopted to address this challenge which put testing as key part of developer responsibility, which helped to made software releases faster (months instead of years).

The collection of cultural practices that help companies deliver at speed was grouped under the term DevOps.

Dev+Ops means developers and operations people collabarating closely as equal partners.

Key Elements of DevOps/SRE culture

  1. Learning

  2. Continuous improvement

  3. Collaborations

  4. Intelligent risks

  5. Relentless focus on customers

What does DevOps culture mean to you?

Everyone has different opinions and perceptions in context with DevOps culture.

Culture can also be viewed as mindset, and strategy can be viewed as your plan/skills.

"Mindset eats skills and plans for breakfast"

-By Shivakumar Gopalakrishnan