Three Ways of DevOps

Flow, Feedback, and Continuous Learning

People & Culture | Technical Operations Excellence

3
Core Principles
4
Types of Work
5
Five Ideals
2009
DevOps Movement

The First Way: Flow

Optimize for fast left-to-right flow from Development to Operations to the customer.

  • Make work visible
  • Reduce batch sizes
  • Reduce handoffs
  • Identify and elevate constraints
  • Eliminate waste and hardships

The Second Way: Feedback

Enable fast and constant right-to-left feedback at every stage.

  • Create quality at source
  • Amplify feedback loops
  • Swarm and solve problems
  • Push quality closer to source
  • Stop the line for defects

The Third Way: Learning

Create a culture of continual experimentation, learning from success and failure.

  • Enable organizational learning
  • Institutionalize improvement
  • Transform local discoveries into global
  • Reserve time for improvement
  • Create a safe environment to fail

Four Types of Work

TypePriority
Business ProjectsStrategic value
Internal IT ProjectsInfrastructure
ChangesMaintenance
Unplanned WorkMinimize!

Five Ideals (Unicorn Project)

IdealMeaning
LocalityTeams own end-to-end
Focus & FlowMinimize interruptions
ImprovementDaily practice, not events
SafetySafe to experiment and fail
Customer FocusOutcomes over output

Anti-Patterns to Avoid

Anti-PatternSymptom
Hero CultureSingle person knows system
Wall of ConfusionDev throws over to Ops
Ticket QueueLong waits for changes
Change FreezeFear of deployments
BlamestormingPunishing failures

Key Metrics Alignment

WayKey Metrics
FlowLead time, deploy freq
FeedbackCFR, MTTR, test coverage
LearningExperiments, postmortems

DevOps Definition

DevOps is the outcome of applying the most trusted principles from physical manufacturing to IT.

- The DevOps Handbook

DevOps is a Philosophy

SRE implements DevOps with engineering rigor.