Successful, long-lasting movement have a clear manifesto outlining goals and principles.   Many DevOps adopters may not be aware of the DevOps Manifesto (created by Jez Humble @jezhumble)  nor how successful DevOps requires keeping a clear focus on principles, practices, and value (instead of infrastructure tooling).

DevOps Principles

DevOps value is derived in the core principles that started the movement:

• Iterative
• Incremental
• Continuous
• Automated
• Self-service
• Collaborative
• Holistic

Teams should analyze existing processes against the principles, and see where DevOps practices can add value.

DevOps Practices

A few identified DevOps practices include:

• Self-service configuration
• Automated provisioning
• Continuous build
• Continuous integration
• Continuous delivery
• Automated release management
• Incremental testing

DevOps Tool Capabilities

As Mike (@madgreek65) and Abel (G+AbelAvram) mention, teams commonly focus on tools instead of value. DevOps friendly tooling delivers:

• Self service project via project configuration portals
• Policy configuration for Security, service levels, frameworks, usage, topology concerns
• Automated platform provisioning via service tier templates, frameworks, and policy enforcement points (PEP)
• Process automation with Continuous build, test, and deployment. Code promotion and synchronization across environments and servers
• Dependency analysis and impact analysis

DevOps Value

For value metrics, break up DevOps goals into foundational, optimal, and transformational categories. For example,

Foundation

• Time and effort to create new application environment
• Time to redeploy application
• Time to promote application into a new lifecycle phase

Optimize

• Dynamically right-size infrastructure scale
• Re-use existing platform services and business services from resource pool instead of re-building solution stack

Transformation

• Time and effort required integrating business process, event processor – creating a complex app.
• Time and effort required to apply policy across tenant(s)
• Cost to operate application per user or transaction

Keep a DevOps Focus

So look beyond adding the cool ‘DevOps Engineer’ title and tool names (i.e. Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and Salt) onto your resume.   DevOps is about principles, practices, and creating a collaborative environment that improves software delivery and increases business value.   With good information readily available on the Web, and conference series (for example, DevOpDays ) focused on core DevOps principles and practices, you can stay tuned into the DevOps way of thinking!