14. Operations as a Process

With Xiwei Xu and Min Fu

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.

—W. Edwards Deming

14.1 Introduction

As we discussed in Chapter 9, the continuous deployment pipeline is not just another software product with system-of-systems characteristics, it also has strong characteristics of a process. This is also true for many other operations such as diagnosis, backup and recovery, upgrade, and maintenance. Even your favorite Cron jobs and scripts may be pipelining a set of small tools—a familiar concept in the administrator’s world. We can view the operations world as a large number of such process-oriented systems operating on your applications and your systems. These processes ...

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