There are DevOps tools and DevOps job ads. People talk about culture and sharing and being nice to each other. Sounds pretty fishy, right? The only thing missing is a DevOps certification and we’re done with the DevOps hype. Is DevOps really just a fad? Let’s take a closer look…
You’re frustrated with another department – again
They don’t seem to understand the simplest things. They just throw stuff at you which keeps exploding in your face. The only way to deal with the continual onslaught of their crap is to become cynical. You rant about those guys and try to blame them whenever you can. You are sick of working on their garbage again when you could be doing real work instead. The things that really matter to your department.
But this is why you get a paycheck, right?
Actually, it’s exactly where DevOps comes into play. Why should your day be filled with anger? DevOps tries to overcome the aforementioned obstacles. By encouraging collaboration earlier in the process, DevOps tries to smooth out the boundaries between departments. By demanding automation, DevOps tries to minimize chores and create more room for valuable work. And by encouraging sharing of problems and solutions openly, DevOps tries to dissolve the combative cultures of blame.
It’s up to you to decide whether this is a fad or not. What do you think? Please let us know in the comments!
Agile Web Operations 
I think a hard thing for people to wrap their head around is that DevOps isn’t just about making other people play nice with you. It’s also a thing where you have to buckle down and figure out common ground and build relationships with people you don’t necessarily like or trust. Often corporate PTSD is a two-way street and people waving the DevOps flag often have to make the first few gestures.
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Absolutely right, Sascha! It’s not like: “Hey, let’s do DevOps so people are finally nice to me.” It’s much more as you said.
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It’s not a fad, but it may be in a bit of a bubble right now (vis the job ads, software tools, DevOps clothing lines, jellybean flavors, etc, etc).
But it’s not going away; if you put it in context, you can see that it’s just a subset of a larger and broader movement into lean manufacturing and development methodologies across the enterprise. So far, as productivity mechanics go, I don’t think we have seen anything else so efficient, and until somebody comes up with something that is, businesses will continue down this path.
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You really have to tell me where to get the DevOps flavored jellybeans 😉
I guess you’re right. A lot of the basic thinking of DevOps is based on lean principles.
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I think that level of interest in DevOps will quieten down after a while but I think there is a valid objective somewhere in there (even if no one can concisely articulate what it is).
Is it a new thing? I would say no – there are no DevOps ‘tools’ that do something that wasn’t being done before the phrase was coined. I believe that the DevOps movement is the recognition of the problem of getting software from source code to production in an effective manner. The movement will fail if it becomes focused on the application of Puppet or some continuous integration tool because they are just tools to create solutions. If we don’t understand the problems well enough, the tools won’t do the thinking for us.
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Yes, tools alone won’t cut it. The most important thing is that people understand that DevOps is about building a better business culture to deliver results that matter, faster.
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I like the idea of getting developers more involved in operations side of things.
The biggest hurdle with implementing something like dev ops is a company’s culture.
If development and operations are already having remote or even strained relations, training your developers on operations is inviting more conflict and may make the operations team feel like they’re being told how to do their job. I’ve seen situations where people in operations were developing applications and developers were building and maintaining their own servers. However, when it came time to work together as a team to solve issues, feuds would break out and everyone would point the finger when things went wrong. I think Dev Ops is great, but these kind of things always come back to the willingness of individuals to work together.
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