This blog is inspired directly from this podcast from notable industry luminaries at Cloud Technology Partners and CSC. In synopsis, it talks about how DevOps, as a way of working and engaging with the business is able to support digital strategies and movements towards the cloud.
The key theme is that DevOps is not tooling and we should not let the conversation be treated in such a simplistic fashion. In the words of the podcast guest JP Morgenthal "The industry has brought its definition [DevOps] to mean the technical specialisation and ability to build software modules instead of the underlying business services and organisational strategy DevOps set out to change".
We have seen this before with Java, Enterprise Application Integration (EIA) and perhaps most famously with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which became about Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technologies from major vendors such as IBM and Oracle. As a result, the business lost interest in SOA and moved on.
DevOps is not about Chef, Ansible, JIRA - rather you need to understand configuration management, automated testing principles, delivery and release processes.
JP goes on to relate Service Management back to DevOps and talks about his concept of Service, Integration and Management (SIAM) and the extension of this into running Business Services where more than one vendor may be involved in being accountable for the outcome.
We agree completely with these views and this is why we are bringing DevOps to organisations through simulations that win hearts and minds inside the business. It helps to create "aha!" moments, and rallies support across all teams to use DevOps for agility, transparency, and bringing innovation to the business.
Our approach is to combine learning and sharing of experiences and expectations in a simulation environment, along with formation of a vision plan for how to continue along your DevOps journey, building upon what has already been achieved.
The alternative is devolving into a series of skirmishes about which tools to use, the business losing interest in DevOps and then continuing with Shadow IT, which delivers business value (good), but in a fragmented, ungoverned, and possibly inefficient manner (bad).