Hi there. As we began to explore what it means to have a DevOps mindset and the principles that are associated with it, it's important to start with defining DevOps itself so that we all have a shared understanding of what we mean when we use this term. Since my job relies on implementing DevOps best practices for my organization, something I suspect most of you are looking to do since you're taking this course, I naturally get asked to define DevOps all the time. By the end of this lesson, you'll have a firm understanding of how I and more importantly most DevOps thought leaders define the term. You'll be able to define DevOps and discuss some of the important components. You'll also be introduced to and be able to define both the CAMS and CALMS, acronyms that make up the core values of DevOps, and describe how Lean Management relates to the DevOps field. All right, let's get started. One of the most interesting things that I learned as I started to get exposure to DevOps was the strong connection to Lean management approaches, and really, how many of the DevOps principles and practices started with Lean? For those of you who aren't familiar with lean, the key idea is that it's about delivering more value, eliminating waste with a strong focus on respect for people. In order to achieve these aims in DevOps, the idea is to break down historic silos and improve collaboration between development and operations teams to streamline and improve work in some key ways. It used to be that separate teams wrote the code, tested the code, deployed the code, and then maintain the code during a product's lifecycle. The idea behind DevOps is to break down all those barriers and get everyone collaborating from the get-go on the same team. Ultimately, DevOps is about people, which is really what Lean management approaches are about as well. It's about creating a culture of focusing on delivering value for the customer. Back in 2010, two major DevOps thought leaders, Damon Edwards and John Willis, coined the acronym CAMS, C-A-M-S, which stood for Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing. Later, Jez Humble, another thought leader in the DevOps community, who's authored a number of books, decided to add Lean to the mix, creating the acronym CALMS. DevOps is about improving culture, setting up automation where it makes sense, applying lean management principles, figuring out effective ways to measure our efforts, and sharing ideas to solve problems with one another. These are some of the core values at the heart of DevOps. So, there's quite a bit of industry debate about how to define DevOps, and I personally have a couple definitions that I like to use when I get asked to define DevOps. One of the definitions comes from John Willis, who again, helped come up with CAMS. He says that DevOps is about humans, DevOps is a set of practices and patterns that turn human capital into high-performance organizational capital, and I think that's a really good way of thinking about it. Again, you can't forget that good work is really about people working together. It's really about figuring out how you can turn your organization into a high-performing organization. Another definition I like is from Gene Kim, coauthor of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, and Accelerate. He's also the founder of the DevOps Enterprise Summit. He shared the following definition in a paper he wrote called The Top 11 Things You Need To Know About DevOps. DevOps is the emerging professional movement that advocates a collaborative working relationship between Development and IT Operations, resulting in the fast flow of planned work, for example, high deploy rates, while simultaneously increasing the reliability, stability, resilience, and security of the production environment. Some of the key components of that definition or that it's not just about technology, it's not just about process, and it's not just about people, it's really the combination of all three that make DevOps come to life. It's about a full life cycle of delivering value, building, deploying, operating, and supporting. Since that paper was written, the industry has also acknowledged the need to incorporate security teams into that definition. Sometimes even seeing the phrase DevSecOps being used and conferences popping up with that name incorporated. Even more recently, the need to have business buy in and participation is also becoming critical. Really, what's being discovered is that in order to really practice a DevOps mindset, the entire organization needs to transform and be engaged in the practices. I think that's one of the biggest adjustments for people when they're starting to learn about DevOps practices. Traditionally, a lot of organizations have a development team, test team, release team, and operations team, security team, and business teams, and what DevOps aims to do is to break down those silos and make the entire team accountable for all of those things instead of just handing them off. We'll discuss some strategies for removing silos and really optimizing speed and value in later lessons. I'd like to close with a couple of additional pieces of information that have, I would say, created some miss in the industry around DevOps. At one point, there was a concept introduced called NoOps. It's amazing how a new term can create a lot of misunderstanding and confusion. NoOps got picked up with a lot of enthusiasm by the IT journalist community, and ultimately, as organizations migrate to the cloud and have some of their operations capabilities provided by platform service providers, that will change the operation's role and capabilities, but there will never stop being a need for operational excellence and people who understand what it takes to sustain a resilient product and production. It's important to understand that the term NoOps can easily be misused and misinterpreted, and as we continue through the course, you'll see why. Ops does not go away, it is actually a critical component to how DevOps is practiced in an organization. Finally, another interesting debate that happens in the industry is about whether organizations should create a DevOps team or should organizations have titled called DevOps. Ultimately, what's really important is the culture of collaboration, not the name of the team. If you have the practices around CALMS happening within your organization, then you are likely doing DevOps. It's not about labeling or creating another organization that's accountable for DevOps, it's about a culture, and it's about ensuring that you're automating the right things, that you're measuring and understanding the data within the environment, and ultimately, sharing. Again, all of that is grounded in practicing Lean strategies. So, that's a brief introduction to how we think of DevOps how it's defined. As we continue in this module, we'll explore principles that make up the foundation of what DevOps is. I hope you'll join me.
