(Sec)DevOps 3 Golden Rules
#1-Learn Everything; #2-Self-Assess; 3-Continuously Improve
1 — Learn Everything
DevOps engineers are the core elements of synchronization which allow product teams to deliver content as quickly as possible to the customer-base aka end-user — whoever that might be.
In the Kitchen/Cooking industry, DevOps Engineers are Line Chefs, they work, manage, prepare the delivery of food to the customer. They have critical dependencies on the teams to the left & right.
Learn about every tool you interact with in the environment, understand the purpose, use-cases, actor-roles, and challenges.
2 — Self-Assessment
Every environment is different. Each company, organization, and team has a preference in tools. Be flexible, evaluate your capabilities, understand the existing version of the software, avoid “dinosaurs systems” —one’s which people make excuses about updating. You want a to work on a constantly improving / evolving forefront of technology. Dinosaur Applications avoid major version upgrades & are often dated a version or 2 back.
Self-assess yourself against XebiaLab’s Periodic Table of DevOps elements. Then fill-in & focus on technical knowledge gaps.
Building a DevOps Skills Matrix
First, start by going through the list of tools & clicking on the one’s you recognize, work with, or have mastered.
Organization leaders, managers, and even Talent Acquisition personnel can gain a better understanding of their organization if they provide tool maps to JR. Engineers — highlighting the area’s of interest where the jr. engineer can focus on Day 1.
3 — Continuously Improve & Deliver
An introduction to CI/CD
The increased demand for DevOps developers requires individuals with a large appetite for knowledge & experience across a wide variety of tools.
As you see from the Skill-Matrix above, SecDevOps engineer’s are required to have a wide variety of experience and knowledge across tools. Each team & organization uses these tools differently yet they share the common goal(s).
Let’s take a quick look at a simplified CI/CD linear visual…
The faster your team can implement tooling, the quicker you can focus on building time-saving & effort saving automation which eliminates error-prone manual steps.
Using integrated tooling allows you to identify simple & complex issues while improving quality. Read on to understand how to learn more about measuring quality…
Embrace Metrics, Establish Milestones, Measure Progress
These 3 phrases are a key part of measuring objective growth. Measurements are always subjective yet the ability to reflect back on them transparently, empathize with the human reaction to technical complexities, and ask the right questions to use business intelligence as a fuel for passionate change helps lead an organization/product/team in an evolutionary direction.
Looking quickly at the image to the left, you can see there are many different types of DevOps metrics. To better understand these metrics you need to establish reliable methods of obtaining the core numerical value. For the purpose of this article, metric collection & logging are out of scope.
Once you have an insight into these metrics, you can focus on bottlenecks and/or understand how system changes can return positive and negative results within a continuous delivery environment. The goal is an exponential positive result.
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