DEVOPSdigest

DEVOPSdigest asked experts from across the industry to define what DevOps means to them. The goal is to show just how many varied ideas are connected with the concept of DevOps, and in the process learn a little more what DevOps is all about. The fourth and final installment outlines the many approaches and tools associated with DevOps.

Start with 17 Ways to Define DevOps - Part 1

Start with 17 Ways to Define DevOps - Part 2

Start with 17 Ways to Define DevOps - Part 3

12. HIGH VELOCITY

DevOps is a cultural and professional movement focused on how we build and operate high-velocity organizations, born from the experiences of its practitioners.
Lucas A. Welch
Director of Communications, Chef

DevOps is developing synergy between development and operations teams to reduce response time and deploy high-quality services, fast. With our experience working with IT teams of three to 20 professionals, we've found DevOps to be a major trend, allowing them to better work with limited resources, and meet goals quickly and efficiently.
Aaron Kelly
VP of Product Management, Ipswitch

For me, DevOps is about how we deal with changes. DevOps and other agile methodologies now allow IT to deliver changes into production at an overwhelming pace. But at the same time this introduces real challenges from a stability perspective, leaving IT operations vulnerable. Today, as release automation and DevOps tools are adopted, IT ops is missing the visibility required for understanding the actual changes that are implemented, assessing their impact and making adjustments accordingly. Most performance incidents, ultimately, result from changes and many of those changes originate on the development side of the house. To close the change loop, this means correlating and intelligently understanding all actual, planned and unplanned, changes. So with DevOps, I see an opportunity for deeper interaction and continuous communication between development and production. This is the surest path to quickly and effectively isolate the root cause of an incident as well as for preventing incidents.
Sasha Gilenson
CEO, Evolven

13. SPEED + QUALITY

DevOps is often referred to as a role in an organization, but I prefer to think of it as a process. Specifically, a DevOps organization has streamlined communication and workflow between its development and operations teams. The goal is to increase development velocity without sacrificing quality. Quality here can mean code quality as well as stability of the underlying infrastructure. In this day and age of big data, quality needs to be discussed alongside scalability. To meet those goals, a DevOps organization deploys best practices around agile development, testing, continuous integration, monitoring and containerization.
Andrew Levy
CEO and Co-Founder, Crittercism

DevOps has transformed the operational models in many industries by bringing together corporate functions to work together to deliver systems faster and with more targeted functionality. By expanding the scope of process participants to include key vendors as technology partners in DevOps programs, innovation is accelerating across all the inputs to their production processes.
Tim Pearson
Senior Advisor, Product Line Management, Ciena

14. AGILITY

In the product reviews of DevOps solutions written by reviewers on IT Central Station, the most common theme is agility. These reviewers give five star reviews to the DevOps solutions that enable continuous integration, automated release management, and agile operations.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

Click here to read the latest Devops product reviews on IT Central Station

DevOps is about flexibility and agility. Today's customers are becoming more sophisticated and their expectations continue to evolve with new technologies. Leveraging continuous delivery enables you to quickly fix a customer issue one day and surprise the customer the next day with a brand new feature, with a push of button. This highlights the power of DevOps and what it can do not only for your business, but for your customers also.
Chris Smith
COO, Idera

I describe DevOps as accelerating the time-to-value of new or enhanced applications by leveraging agile software development and continuous delivery practices. DevOps is an interesting movement within IT because it's not necessarily tied to a new lifecycle function or job role, but rather a philosophical change that embraces how – and the pace by which – applications are developed, delivered and enhanced.
Marcus MacNeill
VP, Product Management, Zenoss

15. CONTINUOUS DELIVERY

DevOps means continuous delivery to support rapid innovation.
Payal Chakravarty
Sr. Product Manager - APM, IBM

DevOps is a process model that provides an agile, continuous delivery framework for application development and its deployment into the network in a collaborative and operational manner.
Frank Yue
Director of Application Delivery Solutions, Radware

DevOps is the banner that represents the day-to-day practices required to successfully do Continuous Delivery. DevOps is the combination of cross-functional teams, cultural dynamics, clear communication, and innovative technologies that supports the manifestation of continuously delivered software.
Michael Sage
Chief Evangelist, BlazeMeter

DevOps means finally the chance to break down the old slow and broken process for developing applications: Solicit User Requirements (too many), Design (in Ivory tower), Implement, Test (except you have no time or budget for that), throw over the fence to Operations where Live and Disappointed users will be your real testers. Now with DevOps, Application Design/Development and Testing can be a continuous and incremental process. Users no longer feel they need to throw the kitchen sink into the requirements as the next cycle is not too far away.
Frank Puranik
Senior Technical Specialist, iTrinegy

16. AUTOMATION

DevOps is about bridging gaps between two groups that historically have misaligned incentives, different skill sets, and different standard operating procedures. Increased automation helps build a foundation for that bridge by streamlining both individual tasks and an end-to-end process that spans development and operations teams.
Kurt Milne
SVP of Product Marketing, CliQr

DevOps expertise will include the proficient use of more sophisticated tools that automate correlation of data analytics and problem resolution dependencies, including cross-silo infrastructure intelligence insights that mitigate performance risk to the deployment of shared or converged compute, storage and networking resources.
Atchison Frazer
VP of Marketing, Xangati

17. PEOPLE, PROCESS AND TOOLS

Previously developers and operations professionals operated as separate entities. Today, teams are adopting agile and lean practices, wanting to move as fast and as safely as possible, and iterating and striving for continuous learning. My view of DevOps is a set of people, process and tools that enable a company to be better positioned for success.
Tim Armandpour
VP of Engineering, PagerDuty

DevOps is more about people and processes than tools, but a good tool will make the process more rewarding (and easier to follow).
Sven Hammar
Founder and CEO, Apica

DevOps is not a product; it is a model of operation captured, specified and implemented with a set of tools. To successfully implement DevOps, there needs to be a deep understanding of workflows that drive business operations.
Venkataraman Anand
Founder and VP of Engineering, CloudGenix