Overcoming Infrastructure Obstacles When Deploying Production-Ready Kubernetes

Chapter 5. People and Process

DevOps is both a mindset and a set of practices, and your team might be all over the map in terms of making progress towards its adoption. DevOps is all about collaboration between previously disparate departments—developers working more closely with operators to ship software more quickly and deliver higher quality. The promise of such a movement has led a lot of vendors to imply that DevOps is something that can be purchased and staffers to infer that it’s someone who can be hired, but it has to be a cultural transformation first and foremost.

Because DevOps is not something you can buy off the shelf, organizations must turn inwardly and be honest with themselves about how they can adopt a DevOps culture and encourage the type of behavior they’re looking to get from it. So how can you do that? One step is to survey your organization and where you are today, and sketch out a piecemeal roadmap towards greater collaboration and agility. For instance, as we mentioned in Chapter 1, you can start forming some bridge teams that function as SRE-lite units. You can and should get started without dramatically shaking up the way your organization functions.

Your team needs to get in the habit of praising work that makes life better for everyone. Instead of giving all the accolades to heroic contributors who pushed user-facing changes, your team needs to shift towards valuing work that automates common tasks and makes deployments more reliable. If leadership ...