What does “devops” mean?

What is DevOps?

 The word Devops is a combination of the words “development” and “operation”. The real meaning behind these words are the „phases“ within a service, product or software development…

Let’s take the case „Software development“ as an example to explain “Devops”.

Normally a software development of a IT-Service provider has to run through these phases:

1.       Development
2.       Test
3.       Acceptance
4.       Production (daily operation)

So, if a company wants to achieve maximum amount of quality of his product (the developed software in this case), they need to walk this way and establish these phases.

But, like I already mentioned in that post: (http://www.svenheide.de/2016/04/16/agile-product-development/)  Quality is expensive! And today the customers are simply not willing to pay this higher price for quality anymore… Everything has to be cheaper!

This is exactly where “Devops” kicks in… Basically the main goal of “Devops” is to reduce the time-to-market time of a development… “Devops” addresses the reduction of the amount of efforts that the phases in the middle (phase 2+3) to a minimum…

Additionally “Devops” addresses a new way of cooperation between the team who develops (Development team) the application and the team who actually releases or runs the application on the future production environment (Operations team).

So “Devops” also requires a new way of thinking of different teams or departments IT-Service providers, many IT-Service providers experienced these “internal fights” between the their software developers and their people who actually run the production environment (the employees who are actually responsible for rolling out the new software releases and run  it high available and with the highest amount of quality as possible).

These “internal fights” resulted into a reduction of the overall service delivering to the end customer… because in the end, he is the primary user of the new software product or the new service, and only because of this fact, that internal teams within the IT-Service providers were collaborating in a bad way, their service is not available so the customer cannot run their main business…. that is a double fail then…

“devops” is an approach to avoid this case. And this is the reason, why so many people from the ITIL IT-Service Management fraction love “devops”, because “devops” and ITIL v3 are basically aiming for same target:

Serving the Business, so that…the “Business” gets enabled to achieve their Goals!

nothing more nothing less!

The following picture got inspired by Pit (aka known as Frank-Peter Schultze (http://www.fpschultze.de/), he explained this once to me with as heart in the picture… 😉