View source for Devops/philosophy

'''DevOps is signal agnostic.'''

Work, tasks, projects, issues, bugs, and other requests come in over chat, irc, email, bugzilla, github, twitter, facebook messages, or carrier pigeon.  The people I am helping decide the workflow, their processes, their tools (mostly), and communication, not us.


'''DevOps is (relatively) tool agnostic.'''

We love AWS, we love MySQL, we love node.js...but if someone needs us to host a php-nuke app, we'll work on figuring out how to do it safely, scalably, and efficiently.  Similarly, if you track your issues with a Trello board, github issues, bugzilla bugs, hand signals, or smoke morse code, we'll file our issues and progress there.


'''DevOps is culture, not this tool or that process.'''

DevOps prevents a lot of failures that might otherwise not be prevented, but believe it or not, its purpose is not to prevent all failure.


''DevOps is about making failure hurt less or not at all.''

Using tight feedback loops, fast communication with developers/product managers/comms teams/vendors/partners/users, centralized accessible logging, data collection and correlation, change logs, new version performance comparisons, front end metrics, traffic information, DevOps provides all the tools and support to make each of these groups capable of moving faster, with more courage.  
When we can try more things, faster, more often...we will try far more things, and be successful more often.


'''DevOps is iterative, team by team.'''

Applications do best when they are tried early in the development process, and DevOps processes and tooling are no different.  Delivering a minimally viable and safe option is not discouraged, but instead enthusiastically encouraged.  Iterating from that point after collecting performance and problem data is obviously then necessary, for both the application and the infrastructure/tooling.


'''DevOps will work so hard to make you (and us) not have to work so hard.'''

Laziness can be a virtue!  We automate, monitor, alert, script our way into easier days and longer nights of sleep.  This goes for your teams too!


'''DevOps is not clever.''' 

Except for animated gifs.
We aren't the first to cross nearly any bridge, and sometimes more importantly, we don't always have to try to be the first to cross that bridge.  Open source software is ubiquitous, as likely are our needs as an organization.  That is a sweet fit.  
We don't need to reinvent the wheel every time, we reuse and we automate.