The DevOps Handbook
My first job after undergrad was for an online gaming company called Oberon Media. I was hired as an operations engineer and tasked with enabling the operations team to automate monitoring, alerting and “proactive resolution”. My time at Oberon was instructive, if stressful, and I learned a great deal. Although my role was pretty innovative for that time, this was in 2006, long before modern practices codified in The DevOps Handbook were widely adopted. Development at Oberon was based in Israel and our Operations team was in New York City. Our Ops team conducted large, dangerous code releases that oftentimes ended up with one of us getting paged at 2 a.m. when a gaming center in South Korea or France went down. It was these types of industry practices from which DevOps was born.
At its core, DevOps is about adopting practices that deliver value faster, safer and more frequently. These practices seek to address the diametrically opposed goals and incentives of Dev. and Ops., which, left unchecked, can result in crippling technical debt or can hamper the achievement of business outcomes. The DevOps Handbook is the non fiction follow-on to The Phoenix Project (and a precursor to The Unicorn Project) and outlines the principles and practices of a high-performing, “generative” DevOps organization.
Our team at Expedient has worked to adopt and integrate practices in the DevOps handbook over the past several years and have achieved a great deal as a result. While these concepts are no longer new, the are eminently relevant and something to which any software team should strive towards.
