DEVOPS IS FOR EVERYBODY Today’s technically savvy customers are accustomed to having immediate access to the benefits of technological innovation, and they’ve grown increasingly intolerant of software that is buggy, unstable or not secure. Customer expectations are driving what is known as the Application Economy, in which customers experience a business through its software. In this economy, technology is a business enabler and the ability to reliably deliver quality software is critical. Even companies in industries far afield from software have found that they need to become software companies to best support their core business. Consider Ford Motor Company: The Ford F-150 truck features more than 150 million lines of code. A lead engineer on the Ford EcoBoost engine team noted that the “secret sauce” in the success of EcoBoost technology is software. Any company that needs to deliver quality software faster needs to care about DevOps and the supporting practice of CD, which enable continuously building, testing and deploying software in frequent, incremental releases. As Henry Ford once said, “Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.” DEVOPS IS COMMON SENSE Historically, software was developed using variations of waterfall methodologies with release cycles measured in months or years. Many of the software development practices used today are outdated, having come into existence in the days of shipping software on disks, running batch jobs on a mainframe or even sorting punch cards. In those times errors were costly, thus processes were focused on preventing errors, often by moving slowly through multiple redundant reviews and approvals, rather than finding them quickly and eliminating them. However, defects inevitably crop up and rework is needed. As such, in following CD practices, release cycles are measured in days, hours or even minutes, and focused on identifying and correcting issues fast. DevOps is a reflection of the industry revisiting outdated concepts and applying common sense changes to meet the demands of the Application Economy. What is DevOps? 9