What is DevOps, what does it mean to customers and how are people approaching it? David Brakoniecki sits down with Krista White to explain the importance.

Speaker 1: Thanks [Brack 00:00:08] for joining us today, and talking about the importance of DevOps. Let's start with what is DevOps, what does it mean to our customers, and what does it mean in general, and how are people approaching it right now?

Brack: I think DevOps is a series of techniques that are designed to help technology teams get changes to the production systems faster. I mean traditionally release management, and technology systems was you had a development team, they built the code, then they handed it off to a testing team, it was a separate team, that tested the code, and sometimes they'd send it back to the development team.

Brack: But if it passed all the tests it would then go to a production system, and that's how you got code into production. It was very long, it was it took a long time, there were lots of different handoffs, and lots of different teams involved, and people involved in that process. I think maybe 10, 15 years ago what people started to realize was actually in the modern world all of our businesses run on technology, and changing them, and having all of these teams involved, and having this rate of change be extremely slow was a bad idea.

Brack: To get more business digitally we had to be able to change our technology faster. And so they started to look at a series of technologies, and a series of approaches, and a series of culture changes to collapse that time. Primarily a lot of it comes down to having your developers take over testing, and do more test-driven development. And also be able to own, and push code to production faster, so to speed up the amount of, to reduce the number of handoffs, and speed up the amount of time it takes to go from development to production.

Brack: If you look at companies like Etsy they release code multiple times a day. They're thought leaders in this space, and they quite famously have all of their new employees push code to production, to their production website on their very first day of their employment at Etsy. And sometimes they release code 10, or 12 times a day. I mean that's the kind of agility a lot of businesses would really love to aspire to.

Speaker 1: How do our customers get from the traditional code releases into a more agile, and DevOps kind of environment?

Brack: Well, I mean first they have to start by realizing that it's not, there's tools that will help you do this, but it's a culture change. They have to think about the fact that their developers are going to be able to push code into production, and that they have to get comfortable with how that works. So they have to teach their developers as well that things like, if something breaks in production you need to fail forward, right? You need to fix the bug in production not roll back all the code.

Brack: That's not the way most technology teams, and big Fortune 50, Fortune 500 companies think. Today they have a quarterly release, they push the code up, if something goes wrong they pull it all out. So the idea that you can fix code, and fail forward in production, and fix it in the same day that's a massive culture change. But there's a lot of things that go along with that, right?

Brack: One of the ideas of you push lots of small batches often, right? This is classic Lean Engineering. If you push small tactical changes 12, 20, 30 lines of code, but you push them five times, 10 times, 20 times a day when something goes wrong it's easy to find. When you push a million lines of code once a quarter, finding the problem when something does go wrong is going through a million lines of code.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Brack: These kinds of things of figuring out how that culture change works, and figuring out how to change your culture, change your development techniques, and change your whole release process, it's starts with changing your mindset.

Speaker 1: That's great. Well, thanks Brack for joining us today, and talking about DevOps, and the importance.

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