What Are DevOps Principles?

DevOps is a management concept of removing the wall between teams that develop programs and the people who maintain and support it. It sounds fairly simple if you think about it. It makes people wonder why they were even separated in the first place. DevOps Principles are the core values and philosophies that guide and enable a company to build its own DevOps division.

Why are operations and development separate?

It’s hard to imagine that a century ago electronic computers weren’t even invented and electronics as a whole was still in its infancy. Today, in this digital world, we can do almost everything in our daily life — communicate, collaborate, transact, purchase, create — using an electronic device. The future is also headed towards that direction.

History – A lot of companies used to have administration and/or operation departments long before there was a need for IT. Once those companies started using computers and related technologies, they created a small IT department. Once their reliance on technology grew, so did the IT department. DevOps developed separately when the companies began seeing the need to develop their own software. Their IT and development leaders needed to manage and create the structure and related apps from concept to development to deployment — and then integrate them with the existing overall IT network.

Salary – Highly skilled developers get paid much more than their support and administrative counterparts. They average $44 per hour while a technical support representative gets paid $17. It makes organizational sense to separate them based on workgroups. It this way, highly skilled (and paid) people will not have to do tasks that can be done by people with a lower salary grade. While operations is streamlined and the work tasks become specialized, this wall also prevents salary comparisons — and helps avoid the disruption of morale.

Business Model – Not all companies are technology-centric when it comes to their core business models. It is possible for the company itself to be heavily reliant on technology, but their business goals are not. Examples such as Grab/Uber, Airbnb, and eBay are examples of tech-reliant companies that are not categorized as an “IT service/product” provider.

Organizing their development and operations team as two separate departments make sense in the minds of traditional managers since they have different goals.

The benefits and principles of DevOps

DevOps principles and practices were developed over time when managers adept in lean and agile philosophy noticed that all companies are becoming tech-reliant. They also realized that closer collaboration between development and operation teams will reap huge benefits.

Here are five DevOps principles that can give you an idea of how it could apply to your respective organizations, should you plan to build one:

1. Customer-centric goal – To justify a holistic reorganization of your company, senior managers must be convinced of tangible benefits when applying DevOps principles. Having worthwhile goals such as improving customer relations through efficient use of technology will have a long-lasting impact on your business.
2. Responsibility and accountability – There is no point in putting development and operational teams under one roof if they are not held responsible and accountable as one team. It’s like having one general being responsible for those who build the plane, the pilots who fly them, and the ground team who supports both. Their collective performance reflects on each other and the entire group as a whole.
3. Cross-functional autonomous teams – DevOps is designed to work on parallel tasks. Small workgroups completing detail pieces of the puzzles need to operate without being encumbered by management bureaucracy. This is the primary reason why DevOps companies have a much higher delivery rate.
4. Continuous improvement culture – There is also no point in doing a disruptive holistic reorganization without continuous benefits. The DevOps/Agile framework of develop-test-feedback-repeat is designed to keep a company improving daily. It will have a huge impact on the corporate bottom line over a span of time.
5. Automate – Bureaucratic wastage, error, and fixed costs come from repetitive tasks that an organization has to do as part of its business process. DevOps can quickly automate these tasks to fix all the issues mentioned above.

Taken as a whole, DevOps Principles bring a disruptive but positive holistic change to an organization. Implemented correctly, it will reap huge benefits without incurring high upfront costs.