When it comes down to defining DevOps, the industry itself is guilty of muddying the waters, grabbing every opportunity to turn the newest hot term into a lucrative service offering, regardless of how that term is understood. This has lead to as many definitions as there are opinions with DevOps being described among other things as automation practices, a CI/CD pipeline, a philosophy related to maintaining IT infrastructure and even a job title. However, when Patrick Debois back in 2009 embarked on a mission to bring the Agile mindset to the world of IT operations by choosing Ghent, Belgium as the location to organize the first DevOpsDays conference, my understanding of his intent was:

Beyond providing advice in order to help teams thrive, we need to help teams move along in their journey. The better we can do this the more impact we can truly have.

When the rubber hits the road, how do we execute? 

With the end of the year rapidly approaching, many reflect on what happened in 2018. Continuously reminded by the holiday wishes and the jolly spirit omnipresent in every downtown street and building, I naturally dig into my memory banks even more so than I otherwise do. 2018 was a big year for us, lit up by little bubbles of light promising a bright future.

Many teams claim to follow agile and lean practices, yet are still challenged to deliver valuable software on a regular basis. Often, agile practices increase the transparency and visibility of the delivery process and, in turn, the intrinsic quality of the produced results. This creates the perception of an agile delivery model from within the system but rarely is the outside perception aligned with that view.

In a world of on-demand capacity and rapid delivery of small incremental pieces of value into production, heavily regulated organizations often struggle to align the need for organizational governance with their transformation. One way to approach this is to start with highly opinionated pipelines where the controls are baked in.

As soon as the sun first rises above the horizon in Springtime and melts the accumulated snow and ice, high in the Canadian arctic on Baffin Island, the arctic poppy hangs on to every ray of light it can grab and livening up the rocks it grows in between and on top of. When the sun no longer disappears during midsummer nights, its stem rotates the full 360° so that the flower maximizes the benefits from the scarce warmth and light it needs to grow. The circumstances in the high arctic are harsh such that very few plants or animals can survive. Yet, the delicate arctic poppy has found a way to thrive there.