DevOps Defined

The Four Pillars of Effective DevOps

Patrick Debois has said that DevOps is a human problem, implying that every organization will have a DevOps culture that is unique to the humans within it. While there is no one “true” way of doing DevOps that will be identical for every organization, we have identified four common themes that any team or organization looking to implement DevOps will need to spend time and resources on.

Here are the four pillars of effective DevOps:

• Collaboration

• Affinity

• Tools

• Scaling

The combination of these four pillars will enable you to address both the cultural and technical aspects of your organization. It makes sense for your organization to focus on one or two pillars at a time while trying to make changes, but ultimately it is the combination of all four working together that will enable lasting, effective change.

It is important not to gloss over the first two pillars, which cover the norms and values of our cultures and interpersonal interactions, in favor of skipping straight to reading about tools. Effective tool usage is necessary for a successful DevOps transformation, but not sufficient—if that were the case, we could just provide a list of best practices for Chef or Docker and be done. However, resolving the interpersonal and interteam conflicts that arise within organizations is critical to fostering the lasting relationships that ultimately make a DevOps environment.

Collaboration

Collaboration is the process of building toward ...