What is DevOps?

Summary

In this video, Andrea Crawford from IBM Cloud explores the transformative power of DevOps in IT organizations. She highlights the historical conflict between application development and IT operations, emphasizing the need for collaboration to enhance both velocity and quality in software delivery. Crawford outlines the application delivery pipeline, which includes ideation, coding, building, managing, and continuous learning. She discusses three key use cases for optimizing DevOps: enhancing legacy systems, fostering cultural integration, and adopting cloud-native practices. Ultimately, DevOps is presented as a strategy focused on people, processes, and tools to drive business agility.

Takeaways

• 😀 DevOps is the integration of application development and IT operations, aiming to reduce conflict between these groups.
• 🚀 Velocity is a key benefit of DevOps, enabling quicker application delivery through the release pipeline.
• 🔍 Quality is equally important; rapid delivery must not compromise the overall quality of applications.
• 🏢 Business agility improves as DevOps practices help organizations respond better to consumer demands and market changes.
• 🔗 The application delivery process is compared to a supply chain, including stages from ideation to continuous improvement.
• 💡 Ideation involves defining user stories and the value each application brings to the business.
• 👨‍💻 Coding is centered around programming based on the defined user stories to create functional applications.
• 📦 The Build phase includes unit testing, packaging code, and preparing it for deployment in various environments.
• ⚙️ The Manage phase focuses on the application's performance in production and other stages like development and testing.
• 🔄 Continuous improvement is essential; the Learn phase helps refine processes and improve both speed and quality over time.

Q & A

What is the main focus of DevOps?

DevOps aims to bridge the gap between application development and IT operations, addressing the tension between the two to enhance overall business agility.

How is success measured differently in application development and IT operations?

Application development success is measured by the number of changes, features, and defects addressed, while IT operations focus on system stability and availability.

What are the two main benefits of DevOps transformation?

The two main benefits of DevOps transformation are increased velocity in application delivery and improved quality of the delivered applications.

Why is balancing velocity and quality important in DevOps?

Balancing velocity and quality is crucial because delivering applications quickly without ensuring their quality can harm a company's digital reputation and overall success.

How can the conflict between development and operations affect businesses?

The conflict can lead to slower response times to consumer demands and market changes, ultimately diminishing business agility and time to market.

What are the stages involved in the application delivery pipeline?

The application delivery pipeline consists of five stages: ideation, coding, build, manage, and learn.

What does the 'Learn' stage in the application delivery pipeline emphasize?

The 'Learn' stage focuses on continuous improvement, assessing both the speed of application delivery and the quality of the applications being delivered.

What does optimizing the core refer to in the context of DevOps?

Optimizing the core involves modernizing legacy systems, often monolithic and challenging to update, by implementing automation in situ.

What is meant by 'unlocking the legacy' in DevOps?

Unlocking the legacy refers to changing organizational culture and collaboration practices, fostering integrated, multi-disciplinary teams to enhance automation.

How do cloud-native applications relate to the 'unleashing the digital' use case?

Unleashing the digital focuses on utilizing modern technologies such as cloud-native applications, Kubernetes, and Docker for continuous delivery and improvement in application development.