Delivery of Things World team and Nishan Subedi sat down together to discuss the impact of the DevOps prior to his talk at the event this April.
Delivery of Things World: There has been growing buzz about DevOps. What is DevOps and how can it best be deployed in the enterprise?
Nishan Subedi: The DevOps movement fundamentally bridges the gap between development and operations in software. The first step towards a DevOps culture is through effective communication. If the product having completed its development cycle does not imply that it is ready for production, there may be a communication gap between the developers and operators. This may manifest as lack of trust, lack of involvement of interested parties throughout the product development cycle, etc. Fostering a culture of DevOps may help bridge this gap, and enable developers and operators to understand that we are all on the same side and are all trying to achieve the same goal of delivering quality software in a timely manner.
Delivery of Things World: Is DevOps a technical movement?
Nishan Subedi: The key aspects of the movement are cultural. The goal is to bring about a model and culture of ownership of the product throughout its life cycle, and to highlight the value of collaboration between the development and operations staff throughout all stages of the development cycle. Though there can be multiple ways to enable this, the focus should be primarily on the people over the process and tools used. The effectiveness of the technologies are dependent on the conversations people have and the culture that they foster.
Delivery of Things World: What business issue does this address?
Nishan Subedi: The end goal of the movement is to better enable the business. Devs and Ops coming together to figure out the challenges of the business and plans to address this together, rather than provide on one segregated aspect of the business function, e.g. building new features for Devs and keeping the site running for Ops leads to an increase in feedback loops, which help increase the overall quality and effectiveness of the product.
Delivery of Things World: How can DevOps help in getting your products out there faster and with more confidence?
Nishan Subedi: Trust and communication between the people involved in product creation reduces the fear of change and the risk in deployment of product. It gets people thinking about the entire lifecycle of the product from much earlier on. This then shifts thinking from working on a fully featured product to building in more iterative cycles. Having this ability to course correct in small iterations throughout the process of development helps to not only get the product out faster, but the end product serves the business purpose much better as well.
Delivery of Things World: Shout-outs: Any sites/people/articles or books that have inspired you lately?
Nishan Subedi: Patrick Dubois’s blog is a treasure trove of great insights in the field of DevOps. I highly recommend anyone that in interested in understanding DevOps read his blog posts: http://www.jedi.be/blog/
His talk on DevOps Modelling is a great primer to the DevOps movement.
The Delivery of Things World team thanks Nishan Subedi for his insights!
About Nishan Subedi: Nishan is a technology enthusiast who loves working on infrastructure tools. He works on the DevTools team at Etsy where he strives to make the development environment and deployment pipeline better.
About Etsy: Etsy is a marketplace where people around the world connect, both online and offline, to make, sell and buy unique goods. The heart and soul of Etsy is our global community: the creative entrepreneurs who use Etsy to sell what they make or curate, the shoppers looking for things they can’t find anywhere else, the manufacturers who partner with Etsy sellers to help them grow, and the Etsy employees who maintain and nurture our marketplace.