The document discusses the importance of DevOps in driving high performance within IT organizations, detailing the evolution and key practices that contribute to successful implementation. It emphasizes the need for organizations to adapt their operations by fostering collaboration, feedback loops, and a culture of experimentation to overcome chronic conflicts between IT and business needs. Overall, the document argues that embracing DevOps not only enhances efficiency and reliability but is essential for organizations to remain competitive in an increasingly technology-driven landscape.

1. Why Everyone Needs DevOps Now:
My Fourteen Year Journey
Studying High Performing IT
Organizations
Gene Kim
Session ID:
@RealGeneKim, genek@realgenekim.me

2. Where Did The High Performers Come From?
@RealGeneKim

3. Visible Ops: Playbook of High Performers
The IT Process Institute has
been studying high-performing
organizations since 1999
What is common to all the high
performers?
What is different between them
and average and low
performers?
How did they become great?
www.ITPI.org
@RealGeneKim

4. Act I: IT Ops Fixing Fragile Artifacts
@RealGeneKim

5. @RealGeneKim

6. The Product Managers
@RealGeneKim

7. Act 2: The Developers
@RealGeneKim

8. @RealGeneKim

9. @RealGeneKim

10. IT Ops And Dev At War
10
@RealGeneKim

11. Nothing Left For Infosec
@RealGeneKim

12. @RealGeneKim

13. The Downward
Spiral…
13
@RealGeneKim

14. @RealGeneKim

15. So, CEOs Don’t Trust IT…
“If IT fails I don't know why… and if IT succeeds I don't know why.”
“By managing inputs and outputs, I can hold any area of the
business accountable – except for IT…”
“Large investments in IT projects that eventual fail, without
warning. And the CIO is the first to say, ‘I told you so.’”
“I can’t hold IT accountable – IT is way too ‘slippery.’”
Source: Gene Kim 2012
15
@RealGeneKim

16. The IT Core Chronic Conflict
Every IT organization is pressured to simultaneously:
Respond more quickly to urgent business needs
Provide stable, secure and predictable IT service
16
Source: The authors acknowledge Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt, creator of the Theory of Constraints and
author of The Goal, has written extensively on the theory and practice of identifying and resolving
core, chronic conflicts.
@RealGeneKim

17. Every Company Is An IT Company…
95% of all capital projects have an IT component…
50% of all capital spending is technology-related
Where we need
to be…
IT is always in the way
(again…)
We are here…
@RealGeneKim

18. The Urgency Of This Business Problem
“Of the Fortune 500 companies in 1955, 87% are gone...
“In 1958, the Fortune 500 tenure was 61 years;
now it’s 18 years…”
–Richard Foster, “Creative Destruction”
18
@RealGeneKim

19. How Team Obama’s tech efficiency
left Romney IT in dust
Obama campaign’s tech team beat Romney by using opposite strategy—
“insourcing.”
Even taken with the software and Web hosting expenses, the Obama campaign
spent a seventh of what the Romney campaign spent on digital….
In the end, the deciding factor wasn’t what the Obama campaign spent money
on, but what it did with all that money. Insourcing gave the campaign a strategic
flexibility that the Romney campaign lacked….
“This is the difference...between a well run professional machine and a gaggle of
amateurs....
I would be shocked if such a chasm exists next cycle between the parties—these
aren’t mistakes to be repeated if you want to do things like win elections.”
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/how-team-obamas-tech-efficiency-left-romney-it-in-dust/
19
| Reimagining the Application Lifecycle

20. Build. Measure.
Learn.
Technologies
accelerate
businesspractice
changes
The massive scope of its
polling effort helped
guide the Obama
campaign in ways that
would be impossible with
conventional polling…
three-day rolling-average
tracking in each state.
“We ran the election 66,000 times
every night,” said a senior official,
describing the computer
simulations the campaign ran to
figure out Obama’s odds of
winning each swing state. “And
every morning we got the spit-out
— here are your chances of
winning these states. And that is
how we allocated resources.”
Surveys used live
interviewers, very large
sample sizes and very short
questionnaires, which
focused on vote preference
and strength of support,
with no more than a handful
of additional substantive
questions.
Hired campaign
staff engineers
from Facebook,
Twitter, Google,
Microsoft, and
technology
startups.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/21/obama-campaign-polls-2012_n_2171242.html
http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/

21. Act 3:
There Must Be A Better Way…
21

22. Source: John Allspaw
@RealGeneKim

23. @RealGeneKim

24. Source: John Allspaw
@RealGeneKim

25. @RealGeneKim

26. Source: John Allspaw
@RealGeneKim

27. Source: John Allspaw
@RealGeneKim

28. Source: Theo Schlossnagle
@RealGeneKim

29. Source: Theo Schlossnagle
@RealGeneKim

30. Source: Theo Schlossnagle
@RealGeneKim

31. Source: John Jenkins, Amazon.com
@RealGeneKim

32. @RealGeneKim

33. Who Is Doing DevOps?
Google, Amazon, Netflix, Etsy, Akamai, Twitter, Facebook,
Pinterest …
BNY Mellon, Bank of America, World Bank, Paychex, Intuit…
The Gap, Nordstrom, REI, Macy’s, GameStop, Target …
Portland State University, Seton Hill University, Kansas State
University…
Who else?
33
@RealGeneKim

34. High Performing DevOps Teams
They’re more agile
30x more frequent deployments
8,000x faster lead time than their peers
They’re more reliable
2x the change success rate
12x faster MTTR
Source: Puppet Labs 2012 State Of DevOps: http://puppetlabs.com/2013-state-of-devops-infographic
@RealGeneKim

35. 35
@RealGeneKim

36. How Can We Better
Sell DevOps?
36

37. Eric Passmore, former SVP Global Engineering, AOL (2007)
37
@RealGeneKim

38. The Downward Spiral
Operations Sees…
Fragile applications are prone to
failure
Long time required to figure out “which
bit got flipped”
Detective control is a salesperson
Too much time required to restore
service
Too much firefighting and unplanned
work
Planned project work cannot complete
Frustrated customers leave
Market share goes down
Business misses Wall Street
commitments
Business makes even larger promises
to Wall Street
Dev Sees…
More urgent, date-driven projects
put into the queue
Even more fragile code put into
production
More releases have increasingly
“turbulent installs”
Release cycles lengthen to
amortize “cost of deployments”
Failing bigger deployments more
difficult to diagnose
Most senior and constrained IT
ops resources have less time to
fix underlying process problems
Ever increasing backlog of
infrastructure projects that could
fix root cause and reduce costs
Ever increasing amount of
tension between IT Ops and
Development
These aren’t IT Operations problems…
These are business problems!

39. Gene Kim, CTO, Tripwire, Inc. (2006)
39
@RealGeneKim

40. The Downward Spiral
Operations Sees…
Fragile applications are prone to
failure
Long time required to figure out “which
bit got flipped”
Detective control is a salesperson
Too much time required to restore
service
Too much firefighting and unplanned
work
Planned project work cannot complete
Frustrated customers leave
Market share goes down
Business misses Wall Street
commitments
Business makes even larger promises
to Wall Street
Dev Sees…
More urgent, date-driven projects
put into the queue
Even more fragile code put into
production
More releases have increasingly
“turbulent installs”
Release cycles lengthen to
amortize “cost of deployments”
Failing bigger deployments more
difficult to diagnose
Most senior and constrained IT
ops resources have less time to
fix underlying process problems
Ever increasing backlog of
infrastructure projects that could
fix root cause and reduce costs
Ever increasing amount of
tension between IT Ops and
Development
These aren’t IT Operations problems…
These are business problems!

41. Anonymous Product Manager / UX (2011)
41
@RealGeneKim

42. The Downward Spiral
Operations Sees…
Fragile applications are prone to
failure
Long time required to figure out “which
bit got flipped”
Detective control is a salesperson
Too much time required to restore
service
Too much firefighting and unplanned
work
Planned project work cannot complete
Frustrated customers leave
Market share goes down
Business misses Wall Street
commitments
Business makes even larger promises
to Wall Street
Dev Sees…
More urgent, date-driven projects
put into the queue
Even more fragile code put into
production
More releases have increasingly
“turbulent installs”
Release cycles lengthen to
amortize “cost of deployments”
Failing bigger deployments more
difficult to diagnose
Most senior and constrained IT
ops resources have less time to
fix underlying process problems
Ever increasing backlog of
infrastructure projects that could
fix root cause and reduce costs
Ever increasing amount of
tension between IT Ops and
Development
These aren’t IT Operations problems…
These are business problems!

43. Anonymous Infosec Officer (2012)
43
@RealGeneKim

44. 44
@RealGeneKim

45. @RealGeneKim

46. “This book will have a profound
effect on IT, just as The Goal did
for manufacturing.” –Jez
Humble, co-author Continuous
Delivery
“This is the IT swamp draining
manual for anyone who is neck
deep in alligators.” –Adrian
Cockroft, Cloud Architect at
Netflix
“This is The Goal for our decade,
and is for any IT professional who
wants their life back.” –Charles
Betz, IT architect, author
“Architecture and Patterns for
IT”
46
@RealGeneKim

47. The First Way: Flow
@RealGeneKim

48. The First Way: Flow
Understand the flow of work
Always seek to increase flow
Never unconsciously pass defects downstream
Never allow local optimization to cause global degradation
Achieve profound understanding of the system
@RealGeneKim

49. “Annual business planning sessions can be madding. They think IT
Operations is an ‘all you can eat buffet.’”
-Ben Rockwood,
Director Systems Engineering,
Joyent
@RealGeneKim

50. Define The Work and Make It Visible
Business projects (e.g., new order system)
Internal IT projects (e.g., configuration management, automation,
debt reduction)
Changes (e.g., deploys, improve database performance)
Unplanned work (e.g., site down, site impaired)
50
@RealGeneKim

51. Questions
What is your lead time for changes? (i.e., how long does it take to
go from “code committed” to “code successfully running in
production”)
How much of that is queue time vs. run time?
51
@RealGeneKim

52. @RealGeneKim

53. @RealGeneKim

54. Create One Step Environment Creation Process
Make environments available early in the Development process
Make sure Dev builds the code and environment at the same time
Create a common Dev, QA and Production environment creation
process
@RealGeneKim

55. If I had a magic wand, I’d change the Agile sprints and definition
of “done”:
“At the end of each sprint, we must have working and shippable
code, demonstrated in an environment that resembles production.”
@RealGeneKim

56. Deploy Smaller Changes, More Frequently *
Decouple feature releases from code deployments
Deploy features in a disabled state, using feature flags
Require all developers check code into trunk daily (at least)
Practice deploying smaller changes, which dramatically reduces
risk and improves MTTR
56
@RealGeneKim

57. Breaking The Bottlenecks In The Flow
Environment creation
Code deployment
Test setup and run
Overly tight architecture
Development
Product management
57
@RealGeneKim

58. How organizations achieve high performance
• 89% are using infrastructure version control
• 82% are using automated code deployments
58
Source: Puppet Labs 2012 State Of DevOps: http://puppetlabs.com/2013-state-of-devops-infographic

59. Why Dedicated Teams Vs. Shared Services
59
@RealGeneKim

60. @RealGeneKim

61. Leankit Kanban
61
@RealGeneKim

62. Blackboard Learn: 2005-Present
62
Source: David Ashman, Chief Architect, Blackboard, Inc.
@RealGeneKim

63. Blackboard Learn Building Blocks
63
Source: David Ashman, Chief Architect, Blackboard, Inc.
@RealGeneKim

64. The First Way: Outcomes
Creating single repository for code and environments
Determinism in the release process
Consistent Dev, Test and Production environments, all properly built before
deployment begins
A continuous delivery pipeline that can be relied upon and daily Dev code
commits
Free ourselves from the learned behavior of catastrophic deployments
Decreased lead time
Reduce deployment times from 6 hours to 45 minutes
Refactor deployment process that had 1300+ steps spanning 4 weeks
Faster cycle time and release cadence
@RealGeneKim

65. The Second Way: Feedback
@RealGeneKim

66. The Second Way: Feedback
Understand and respond to the needs of all customers, internal
and external
Shorten and amplify all feedback loops: stop the line when
necessary
Create quality at the source
Create and embed knowledge where we need it
@RealGeneKim

67. Source: John Shook
67
@RealGeneKim

68. “We found that when we woke up developers at 2am, defects got
fixed faster than ever”
– Patrick Lightbody,
CEO, BrowserMob
@RealGeneKim

69. Require That Devs Manage Their Own Code For
6+ Months
Source: Tom Limoncelli, Google
69
@RealGeneKim

70. Test Whether Developers Qualify For IT Operations Resources
Types/frequency of pager alerts
Maturity of monitoring
System architecture review
Release process
Defect counts and severity
Production hygiene
Source: Tom Limoncelli, Google
70
@RealGeneKim

71. Return Fragile Services Back To Dev
Source: Tom Limoncelli, Google
71
@RealGeneKim

72. Feedback And Situational Awareness
“Having a
developer add a
monitoring metric
shouldn’t feel like
a schema
change.”
– John Allspaw,
SVP Tech Ops,
Etsy
72
@RealGeneKim

73. 73
@RealGeneKim

74. 74
@RealGeneKim

75. Integrating Into Continuous Delivery
The days of reviewing RFCs in Word docs in change
management meetings are over
Failures must result in automated tests in the continuous
deployment pipeline (Release, Config, Change)
Invite or embed Ops into Dev standups and the scrum teams
(“hey, we can sprint and scrums, too!”)
@RealGeneKim

76. Embed Dev Into IT Ops
Embed Dev into IT Ops incident escalation process
Put production monitoring in pre-production environments
Invite Dev to post-mortems/root cause analysis meeting
Have Dev and Infosec cross-train IT Operations
Ensure application monitoring/metrics to aid in Ops and Infosec
work (e.g., incident/problem management)
@RealGeneKim

77. What’s In It For Infosec And QA?
77
@RealGeneKim

78. The Second Way:
Outcomes
Defects and security issues getting fixed faster than ever
Standardized and reusable Ops and Infosec user stories now part
of the Agile process
All groups communicating and coordinating better
Everybody is getting more work done
@RealGeneKim

79. The Third Way:
Continual Experimentation And Learning
@RealGeneKim

80. The Third Way:
Continual Experimentation And Learning
Foster a culture that rewards:
Experimentation (taking risks) and learning from failure
Repetition is the prerequisite to mastery
Why?
You need a culture that keeps pushing into the danger zone
And have the habits that enable you to survive in the danger zone
@RealGeneKim

81. Break Things Early And Often
“Do painful things more frequently, so you can make it less painful…
We don’t get pushback from Dev, because they know it makes
rollouts smoother.”
– Adrian Cockcroft, Architect, Netflix
@RealGeneKim

82. 82
@RealGeneKim

83. Inject Failures Often
@RealGeneKim

84. You Don’t Choose Chaos Monkey…
Chaos Monkey Chooses You
@RealGeneKim

85. Break Things Before Production
Enforce consistency in code, environments and configurations
across the environments
Add your ASSERTs to find misconfigurations, enforce https, etc.
Add static code analysis to automated continuous integration and
testing process
@RealGeneKim

86. Reduce Technical Debt
“The deal with engineering goes like this. Product management
takes 20% of the capacity right off the top and gives this to
engineering to spend as they see fit. Whatever is required to
avoid, ‘we need to stop features to rewrite code.
“If you’re in really bad shape today, you might need to make this
30% or even more of the resources. I get nervous when I find
teams that think they can get away with much less than 20%.”
– Marty Cagan, Inspired
@RealGeneKim

87. Allocate 20% Of Cycles To Technical Debt Reduction
@RealGeneKim

88. Recognize Compounding Technical Debt…
@RealGeneKim

89. That Gets Worse…
@RealGeneKim

90. And Fixing It…
Source: Pingdom
@RealGeneKim

91. An Innovation Culture
“By installing a rampant innovation culture, they now do 165
experiments in the three months of tax season.
Our business result? Conversion rate of the website is up 50
percent. Employee result? Everyone loves it, because now their
ideas can make it to market.”
–Scott Cook, Intuit Founder
91
@RealGeneKim

92. Convergence And Evolution Of Ideas
Four Steps To The Epiphany, Steven Blank (2005)
Principles Of Product Development Flow: Second Generation
Lean Product Development, Donald Reinertsen (2009)
Lean Startup, Eric Ries (2011)
Lean UX, Jeff Gothelf (2013)
92
@RealGeneKim

93. Performance by DevOps maturity
Organizations that implemented DevOps practices over 12
months ago were 5x more likely to be high performing than
organizations that weren’t implementing DevOps at all.
93
Source: Puppet Labs 2012 State Of DevOps: http://puppetlabs.com/2013-state-of-devops-infographic

94. Why Do I Think This Is Important?
94

95. The Downward
Spiral…
95
@RealGeneKim

96. @RealGeneKim

97. 97
@RealGeneKim

98. If I Could Wave A Magic Wand, Everyone Will…
See the suffering downstream, and have confidence that your
intuitions and skills can make a profound and positive difference…
Become conversant with DevOps and recognize the practices
when you see them
Be energized about how practitioners can contribute in this
organizational journey
Leave with some concrete steps to get some great outcomes
Help create a team that starts putting DevOps practices into place
98
@RealGeneKim

99. If I Could Wave A Magic Wand, Everyone Will…
Become conversant with DevOps and recognize the practices
when you see them
Be energized about how practitioners can contribute in this
organizational journey
Leave with some concrete steps to get some great outcomes
Become a part of a team that starts putting DevOps practices into
place
99
@RealGeneKim

100. “Some books you give to friends,
for the joy of sharing a great
novel.
“Some books you recommend to
your colleagues and employees,
to create common ground.
“Some books you share with your
boss, to plant the seeds of a big
idea.
“The Phoenix Project is all three.”
–Jeremiah Shirk, Integration &
Infrastructure Manager at
Kansas State University
100
@RealGeneKim

101. Our Mission: Positively Impact The Lives Of One Million IT
Workers By 2017
Free 170 page excerpt:
http://itrevolution.com/the-phoenixproject-excerpt/
http://slideshare.net/realgenekim
DevOps Defensive Audit Toolkit
Enterprise DevOps Case Studies
Early draft of upcoming “DevOps
Cookbook” (Allspaw, DeBois, Edwards,
Humble, Kim, Orzen)
Email me at genek@realgenekim.me
@RealGeneKim