Three years since Jennifer Davis & Kathrine Daniels published the Effective DevOps book – Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale.

It was also three years since I read the book and when I found it during cleaning my dressing room I decided to go through all my favorite quotes marked with a yellow pen.

My top quotes from Effective DevOps

The end goal is to create and maintain a successful organization that solves a problem for your customers.

The more quickly software changes make it into production, the sooner individuals see their work in effect. Visibility of work impact job satisfaction.

Affinity is the measure of the relationship strength between individuals, teams, business units, and event companies.

Empathy allows ops engineers to appreciate the importance of being able to push code quickly and frequently, without a fuss. It allows developers to appreciate the problems caused by writing code that’s fat, or slow, or insecure.

In the devops community, there is a big emphasis placed on postmortems and retrospectives being blameless.

In a blameful culture, discussion stops with finding that specific person made a mistake. In a blameless culture, a human error is seen as a starting point rather than an ending one.

Rather than silos, we view different teams or organizations as islands. Thus, we need to build bridges between the islands.

The designated ops engineer for a given team is not necessary responsible for single-handedly doing all ops-related work for that team, rather that they will be the primary point of contact for that team.

Developers have full AWS access to the development environment and we’ve just enabled read-only production IAM access as well.

Engineers should not be put on pedestals at the expense of other employees, as it takes more than just engineering skills to grow and maintain a successful business.

Devops is about encouraging every member of the organization to contribute to provide value to the whole.

There is no “finally” anymore. There is only an endless cycle of adaptation, change, and learning.

Misconceptions and Anti-patterns

You can not buy or install devops.

Devops is relevant only to web startups. Web startups are not alone in benefiting from improved collaboration, affinity and tools.

There is no separate “enterprise devops” with different tools and practices that applies only to companies with a large number of employees.

If your organization is in a state where the development and operations teams cannot communicate with each other, an additional team is likely to cause more communication issues.

Negotiation or conflict resolution styles – Avoidance; You might see long email threads where people try to shift work or blame without being too direct without ever talking directly with the people being complained about.

People tend to say “I’m not an engineer” or “I’m not technical” as if it were some immutable fact that could never change.

Remember to avoid the trap of “but we’ve always done things this way”!