DevOps, the word, is a mash-up of the words: development and operations. Traditionally, development teams are responsible for producing software systems. And, operations teams are responsible for deploying and managing software systems.
DevOps combines those traditionally separate functions into one delivery team that has a single goal of delivering value to customers.
Gene Kim, an author on DevOps topics and founder of Tripwire, suggest DevOps is the "result of implementing Lean principles to the IT value stream".
Consider the five lean principles:
- Identify Value - distinguish activities that provide value to customers from the activities that do not.
- Map the Value Stream - Visualize all of the activities in the end-to-end process that deliver value to the customer.
- Create Flow - remove the wasteful activities; the activities that are not necessary to deliver value to the customer.
- Establish Pull - prepare yourself to quickly and effectively capture and respond to customer demands.
- Seek Perfection - continuously improve on the application of these principles with the aim of eliminating all waste on only doing the activities that provide value to the customer.
Lean emphasizes delivering customer value in order to maximize revenue opportunities. And, it suggests you do so with as little waste as possible in order to minimize costs. This is the value proposition for organizations looking to adopt DevOps.
Additionally, the application of the Lean principles can lead to "astonishing levels of performance", according to Gene Kim. A 2013 PuppetLabs-sponsored survey of 4000+ IT organizations was cited by Kim:
High performers were doing 8x more frequent production deployments, being performed 8000x faster, with 2x higher success rates, and fixing issues 12x faster when something went wrong.
View the 2013 State of Devops Infographic by PuppetLabs
Damon Edwards, author and consultant on DevOps, identifies three organizational perspectives on DevOps from his work in the field:
- Organizations that have always run their business in this way - typically, these are organizations where time-to-market and quality were their only competitive advantages.
- Mid-size to large organizations that are curious - trying to figure out how to incorporate DevOps into their organizations.
- Enterprises that are realizing time-to-market and quality can put you out of business - research analysts are starting to educate executives on how time-to-market and quality problems can be solved by DevOps.
- InfoQ interview with Damon Edwards, Manuael Pais, May 31, 2014
- Wall Street Journal: Enterprises are not ready for DevOps, but may not survie without it, Abel Avram, June 6, 2014
- The Five Principles of Lean Thinking
- Principles of Lean