The SKILup Playbook Library: A DevOps Collaborative Body of Knowledge (cBok)
June 09, 2020

Jayne Groll
DevOps Institute

It is typical for frameworks or practices to create a body of knowledge or "BoK" upon which they and their offerings are based. Traditionally, BoK's are encapsulated in one or more books, written by one or more authors and updated every few years.


In a space that is as global and fast-moving as DevOps, it has been near impossible to point to a single source as the official DevOps BoK. In fact, DevOps Institute has been advocating for a Collaborative Body of Knowledge (cBok) for several years. To my mind, bodies of knowledge should not be fixed.

The model of an inclusive DevOps Collaborative Body of Knowledge (DcBok) has now become a reality. DevOps Institute‘s new SKILup Playbook Library is a series of topics or role-based holistic guidance that marries thought leadership from industry experts with an orchestrated set of dynamic assets and artifacts from a range of vetted sources. Without a fixed form factor, each playbook in the series can be updated and added to in regular increments to keep them fresh.

Every SKILup Playbook is built upon four "start where you are" pillars and includes twelve research chapter reports plus additional content for ongoing discovery and support.


The first SKILup Playbook is aptly named The DevOps Journey with chapter reports by industry experts such as Shaaron Alvares, Matthew Skelton, Andi Mann, Helen Beal, JP Garbani, Karen Skiles and Eveline Oehrlich, DevOps Institute's Research Director who is leading this initiative. The DevOps Journey Playbook includes orchestrated collaborative content from a variety of other public sources in order to present this Collaborative Body of Knowledge (cBok) in a digestible, dynamic and digital way for the DevOps Human, including:

Explore and Discover

■ Key topics around the vision, mission and objectives of the DevOps Journey.

■ What success looks from case studies and vertical markets.

■ The landscape of the "State of DevOps" today and market insight.

Understand and Learn

■ Frameworks for understanding DevOps and other related industry practices.

■ Functional and technical content including glossary and certification information.

Plan, Practice and Do

■ The cultural aspects of the DevOps Journey including skills, role and workplace structures.

■ Content around key functional and process-oriented tasks including automation and industry research.

Optimize and Improve

■ Performance management including measurement and metrics around key performance indicators, objectives and key results.

■ A library of community resources to support discussions and movements associated with improving daily work performance.

Every SKILup Playbook will follow the same model.

Next up in the SKILup Playbook Library – The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Playbook (with more to come). Stay tuned!

DevOps Institute will be continuously updating the DevOps Journey playbook and others with regional and global perspectives for actionable strategies and implementations. We invite your feedback at customerservice@devopsinstitute.com and welcome interest in participating in our SKILup Playbook Library.

Jayne Groll is CEO of DevOps Institute
Share this

Industry News

February 13, 2025

LaunchDarkly announced the private preview of Warehouse Native Experimentation, its Snowflake Native App, to offer Data Warehouse Native Experimentation.

February 13, 2025

SingleStore announced the launch of SingleStore Flow, a no-code solution designed to greatly simplify data migration and Change Data Capture (CDC).

February 13, 2025

ActiveState launched its Vulnerability Management as a Service (VMaas) offering to help organizations manage open source and accelerate secure software delivery.

February 12, 2025

Genkit for Node.js is now at version 1.0 and ready for production use.

February 12, 2025

JFrog signed a strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

February 12, 2025

mabl launched of two new innovations, mabl Tools for Playwright and mabl GenAI Test Creation, expanding testing capabilities beyond the bounds of traditional QA teams.

February 11, 2025

Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. announced a strategic partnership with leading cloud security provider Wiz to address the growing challenges enterprises face securing hybrid cloud environments.

February 11, 2025

Jitterbit announced its latest AI-infused capabilities within the Harmony platform, advancing AI from low-code development to natural language processing (NLP).

February 11, 2025

Rancher Government Solutions (RGS) and Sequoia Holdings announced a strategic partnership to enhance software supply chain security, classified workload deployments, and Kubernetes management for the Department of Defense (DOD), Intelligence Community (IC), and federal civilian agencies.

February 10, 2025

Harness and Traceable have entered into a definitive merger agreement, creating an advanced AI-native DevSecOps platform.

February 10, 2025

Endor Labs announced a partnership with GitHub that makes it easier than ever for application security teams and developers to accurately identify and remediate the most serious security vulnerabilities—all without leaving GitHub.

February 07, 2025

Are you using OpenTelemetry? Are you planning to use it? Click here to take the OpenTelemetry survey.

February 06, 2025

GitHub announced a wave of new features and enhancements to GitHub Copilot to streamline coding tasks based on an organization’s specific ways of working.

February 06, 2025

Mirantis launched k0rdent, an open-source Distributed Container Management Environment (DCME) that provides a single control point for cloud native applications – on-premises, on public clouds, at the edge – on any infrastructure, anywhere.

February 06, 2025

Hitachi Vantara announced a new co-engineered solution with Cisco designed for Red Hat OpenShift, a hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes.