9 Things I Learnt About DevOps

I recently completed a LinkedIn course on DevOps Foundations and found it really insightful. Besides learning more about DevOps, some of the takeaways I gained are applicable to other areas too. Like the 3 ways and building a culture of trust.

If you’re keen to learn more, I highly recommend this DevOps course by Ernest Mueller and James Wickett. Meanwhile below is a summary of my key takeaways which I’ll like to share with you:

1. DevOps Principles: Use the 3 Ways
   • Systems Thinking
     • Big Picture + Entire System
     • From Concept to Cash
   • Amplify Feedback Loops
     • Short & Effective
     • Between org within value chain
   • Continuous Experimentation
     • Analysis Paralysis vs Fail Fast
2. DevOps Playbook
   • People over Processes over Tools
3. DevOps Practices: Public Status Pages
   • Transparent communication
     • Increase customer satisfaction
     • Retain customer trust
   • Chaos Monkey by Netflix
4. Build a Culture of Trust
   • Trust but verify.
5. Minimum Viable Process 

6. Kaizen

• • 6 Guiding Principles
  • Plan, Do, Check, Act –> Problem Finding, Display, Clear, Acknowledge
  • Gemba: Management by Walking Around
  • The 5 Whys –> People don’t fail, Processes do. Human Error is not a root cause

7. Lean

• • 7 Principles of Lean Software
  • Build, Measure, Learn
  • Value-Stream Mapping + Muda

8. Reliability Engineering

• • Design for Operation
    • Circuit Breaker + Timeout: Integration Point –> Cascading Failure
    • If it hurts, do it more often
    • Application Performance Management Tools –> Find the Problems before you roll them out
  • Operate for design
    • Service Performance and Uptime (Is it working)
    • Software Component Metrics (Is this particular host working)
    • System Metrics (Is it functioning normally)
    • App Metrics (Custom)
    • Performance (APM & RUM)
    • Security
  • 5 Ws of Logging
    • What happened
    • When did it happen
    • Where did it happen
    • Who was involved
    • Where did that entity come from

9. Additional Practices/Concepts/Methodology

• • Blameless Postmortems
  • ChatOps
  • Chef Ops Maturity Model – https://lnkd.in/gJ4vytF
  • Conway’s Law
  • Infrastructure as code + Configuration Management vs Containers

Even though my area of specialization is in Data, I’m looking forward to becoming a T-shaped individual, mentioned in the course, by learning more about different aspects of technology delivery.

Hope this has been helpful to you!