Running a marathon is not an easy task. Participants can spend months preparing for it and need the right motivation and goals to succeed. Transitioning to a DevOps culture and related process can also feel like running a marathon. It will require long term plans, iterating on those plans and the commitment to keep trying, as there will be bumps along the road.
At Cerner, we started adopting Agile and Lean development in late 2008, but we didn’t start transitioning to DevOps till about three years ago. Often DevOps is thought of limited to tools such as Splunk, Zabbix and Jenkins used for production monitoring, continuous integration and continuous deployment. While those are needed to help you get to the finish line, we will discuss how DevOps is a lot more about culture and mindset than tools and without DevOps you can never be truly Agile. This talk will be a case study of what lead us to start thinking about DevOps, where we are in our DevOps marathon and where we should go, as we look to the future. We will discuss how more than one Kaikaku type change, depending on your organizational setup, might be needed for you to achieve DevOps. In the end our goal is to get to working software in production, with minimal waste, and DevOps is the key to get us there faster.
You can find the slides here: http://www.slideshare.net/MuhammadShahzadZafar/running-the-devops-marathon.