Architecting the Cloud: Design Decisions for Cloud Computing Service Models (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS)

Chapter 14

Leveraging a DevOps Culture to Deliver Software Faster and More Reliably

I’ve hugged a lot of servers in my life. They don’t hug you back.

—Werner Vogel, CTO of Amazon Web Services

The term DevOps is relatively new and broadly misunderstood. Many people think of DevOps as an IT role, more specifically as a hybrid between a developer and a systems administrator. The problem with this thinking is that companies tend to create a new silo called DevOps and try to fill this silo with super-administrators who are magically awesome at both development and operations. Sometimes it is easier to find a unicorn.

DevOps is not a group and it is not a role. DevOps is a culture shift or a new way of thinking about how we develop and release software. The DevOps movement is about tearing down silos and fostering communication and collaboration between development, operations, quality assurance, product, and management.

Developing the DevOps Mind-Set

In 2009, the first DevOps Days conference was held in Belgium where several practitioners, inspired by a presentation by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond titled “10 Deploys per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr,” got together to discuss how to create a more collaborative culture among developers and operations. On Twitter, attendees of the conference used the hashtag DevOps to discuss the conference. The topic gained more and more support as more DevOps Days sprung up across the globe. Eventually, the hashtag became the name of this new ...