How to Build a DevOps Culture

DevOps is about more than tools. Its core tenet is a culture of collaboration and shared goals, which eliminates finger-pointing and promotes teamwork, with everyone working together in support of the same outcome—reliable software quickly delivered to production. The challenge for many organizations is how to build a DevOps culture.

People, processes and tools are the DevOps Trinity. The team must understand the trinity before implementation begins. No amount of tooling can overcome a lack of cultural alignment. DevOps requires standard processes and interoperable tools. To achieve success in DevOps, the three planes of the DevOps Trinity need to be connected, from upstream to downstream and across the organization.

1. People and Culture

DevOps seeks to change the dynamics in which operations and development teams interact. Key to this change are the issues of trust, honesty and responsibility. In essence, the goal is to enable the different stakeholders in the software development and delivery process to achieve the mutual understanding and empathy needed to drive alignment on shared goals.

2. Process and Practices

Using a DevOps approach, simple processes become increasingly programmable and dynamic. DevOps aims to maximize the predictability, efficiency, security and sustainability of operational processes. Very often, automation supports this objective.

3. Tools and Technologies

Rather than a single tool there are sets of tools (or toolchains) of multiple tools. The common elements of the toolchain include applications for coding, building, testing, packaging, releasing, configuring and monitoring. Some categories are more essential in a DevOps toolchain than others, especially continuous integration (build) and infrastructure as code (configure) tools.

Truly successful and sustainable DevOps organizations cannot be achieved without all three components of the DevOps Trinity. Visibility and transparency help teams measure results and improve trust, increase collaboration and achieve the larger goal of delivering software faster.

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