Building a DevOps Culture

Chapter 3. What Exactly Makes a Culture “DevOps”?

Culture, as an abstract collection of ideas and behaviors, is hard to pin down to a proscriptive set of requirements. In a technical team, it’s much more easy to talk about what kinds of tools to use and how to use them; the tools themselves are accessible as constructs. The people that will use those tools are complex.

The traditional friction between teams thought of as “development” and teams thought of as “operations” boils down to a few key cultural characteristics.

Open Communication

A DevOps culture is one created through lots of discussion and debate. Traditionally siloed technical teams interact through complex ticketing systems and ritualistic request procedures, which may require director-level intervention. A team taking a more DevOps approach talks about the product throughout its lifecycle, discussing requirements, features, schedules, resources, and whatever else might come up. The focus is on the product, not building fiefdoms and amassing political power. Production and build metrics are available to everyone and prominently displayed. The current infrastructure is documented, and maybe someone went to the trouble of having it printed on a plotter, which is totally cool.

Incentive and Responsibility Alignment

One of the early controversial aspects of what became DevOps was the assertion that Engineering should be doing on-call rotations. In fact, this idea was presented in a way that made it sound like your developers ...