It’s Time to Reclaim ‘DevOps’ for Its Original Purpose

Some words in tech get relegated to buzzwords — even though they start out as a valid approach in technology. DevOps is a perfect example. “What happens is these words are exciting, arriving when we have a chance to change things,” said Tolga Tarhan, Rackspace Technology CTO. “It’s natural to co-opt them into everything you do, but that unfortunately washes the word out and you lose its meaning.”

Tarhan believes it’s time to reclaim ‘DevOps’ for its original purpose — and he’s well suited to doing so. His wealth of experience within the tech industry has involved a decade of building products with modern approaches and helping transform customers and teams to think in a more agile way.

In the latest episode of the Cloud Talk podcast, Tarhan discusses with Rackspace Technology CTO Jeff DeVerter how to build DevOps teams, think in an agile manner, and apply relevant interaction around existing teams.

Reclaim the meaning of DevOps

In 30 minutes, you’ll learn:

• How to structure DevOps teams with core devs, centers of excellence and shared resources
• Why you must refactor existing teams during DevOps and agile transformations
• How clashing team models and methodologies endanger your organization
• Core tenets of DevOps relating to sprints, stand-ups and throughput measurement
• The importance of outcomes over presenteeism in agile and DevOps teams
• How to be flexible and rethink existing processes so they are compatible with DevOps ones
• Why it’s healthy for everyone on DevOps teams to touch the code
• How the cloud enables and accelerates DevOps transformations

But before you get to all that, what actually is DevOps? “What it’s not is a job title. If your job title says ‘DevOps’, it’s a good indicator your company has not actually adopted DevOps,” said Tarhan. What it is, he thinks, is a “series of process changes that apply the agile techniques we’ve learned in software development to the rest of the life cycle.”

Companies have increasingly recognized key benefits in agile methodologies, but DevOps takes things further. “It’s about bringing those same disciplines to infrastructure, configuration, updates and scaling — but not in an isolated way,” said Tarhan. “When you’re done, the agile processes of your dev team and the DevOps processes for your operations come together into one thing. You shouldn’t be able to see the boundary between the two.”

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