What is DevOps culture? What’s behind our DevOps certification on AWS?

DevOps culture. The utopian quest for operational excellence with a clear objective, to optimize your business.

A few months ago, BigCheese obtained the AWS DevOps certification (one of the few in Latin America). We are proud, not only because of the technical part, but also because we believe in the DevOps Culture.

We firmly believe in pursuing business objectives, aligned to a constant search for operational excellence, implementing again and again different methodologies, tools, practices, and processes so that teams work together better and better in pursuit of the business.

It is vital to avoid clashes of interests between the cells of the organization (development wants to release many features quickly, while operations and security want the least amount of changes), the teams must work together following the single goal: the advancement of the business.

In the past, in a more traditional format, it was dealt with in stages, in the long term, with analysis, development, testing, environment transition, security review, performance, etc., and then, at the end, it went to production. If you wanted to add a new feature it went to the top of the queue, for the next version of the process, which made it very un-dynamic.

As everything has changed, we are in the times of now, for yesterday, and new features have to be released as soon as possible, agile methodologies and DevOps culture are ideal to add value to the product in an almost continuous way, validating with use and not so much with theory.

What is DevOps culture for us? It is a whole, where everything seeks to underpin the business.

In the background, we will be able to talk about the importance of automation, tools, best practices, organizational culture (we have a very good talk by Esteban on this), professionalization of the team, monitoring, and many other things, where everything tries to keep the system stable and reliable despite a disruptive and ever-increasing pace of change. That is our operational excellence.

Operational excellence, a constant quest in pursuit of utopia. Operational excellence is at the core of our DevOps culture..

At BigCheese we want everything to work well, as it should and at the right time, generating opportunities for the business. That is why we add “Business” to “DevOps”, so that the business drives the constant search for operational excellence. Ultimately, customers have to be happy, evolving at a continuous but steady pace. All together eating partridges, that is our goal. No security problems, fast, reliable and at the lowest possible cost. It is the pursuit of a utopia, because we will always pursue excellence, we will never reach it because there will always be something more to improve.

It is a matter of culture, not volume. It cuts across all sizes and industries.

Who wouldn’t like to deliver excellence to their customers?

All companies in all sectors can start or improve, it is a cross-cutting, more cultural issue than a technological implementation, it is not a problem of volume either, it is a way of thinking in a “…” mode.DevOps culture. They are those things (small or not) that after generating the habit you can’t imagine how you used to do before.

It is often easy to start with automation, so that the benefits are quickly seen and the teams themselves want to move forward. Something important to comment is that before automating, you have to order… otherwise you would be automating chaos and that is not the objective.

That’s why when people talk about DevOps, the first thing they associate with it is the automation of a deployment or integration pipeline. Although it is much more than that, it is something “achievable” quickly.

Automation is a good place to start.

In the case of large companies, it is necessary to start with a sector, seduce, evangelize, so that they adopt the habits little by little.

In this progressive way it is easier to change the mindset, maybe start by automating by making the benefits tangible, or by involving stakeholders in the conversation, and then the teams will integrate testers, operations, security, sales, etc. into the planning process.

In small companies, where some are overwhelmed with tasks, automating to free up time is an excellent way to conquer and change the mindset, and make room for the next target.

There is no single stage that we can enter, we have different clients with different degrees of maturity in this “methodology”, so to speak. Whether you are at zero (I have no idea), or you are super evangelized with the DevOps culture and want to take it to another level, we have experiences of supporting customers at both ends to overcome daily problems, to improve their business through DevOps, and the results are very good.

Although DevOps is also transversal to all sectors, finance or healthcare companies are already asking for best practices for their developments as an indispensable condition, especially from companies that report to their headquarters in the USA or Europe. Remember that good practices include security, a very sensitive issue in finance and health.

For example, the parent company or the central bank ask for requirements: you must have a disaster recovery plan, high availability, fault tolerance so that if there is a problem the whole system does not go down, that the infrastructure is reliable, that if an incident occurs the platform is automatically aware of the problem and automatically sets up servers somewhere else.

DevOps culture is a whole

We touch on many points, some are a matter of process, others of culture, others of automation, others of technology or techniques, and that is why it is very complete but at the same time complex and dynamic. It is a whole. And that is also why we believe in taking small steps, no matter what stage you are at, there is always room for improvement in the pursuit of operational excellence, in order to optimize your business.