DaaM — DevOps as a Mindset

Most people think DevOps is like a river that flows swift and sure in one direction, but I have seen the face of DevOps and I can tell you they are wrong. DevOps is an ocean in a storm.”

Yes, that was a quote from Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

Why did I choose this quote? Easy. Because it’s real. DevOps is a ocean in a storm. How many times you got lost in all of those DevOps names and stuff? Docker, Kubernetes, Istio, Service Mesh, Deployment Pipeline, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration, PaaS etc etc…

The truth that no one will ever tell is: it’s not a matter of tools or fancy terms (almost).
DevOps is a way to challenge the status-quo of the old static processes in order to rebuild and make them flexible flows. But when rebuilding your workflow, you cannot avoid to rebuild your way of thinking and you should not to. Otherwise there’s no sense in struggling into DevOps.

Nope, Docker and Jenkins are not the automatic solutions to achieve DevOps if you’re still developing, maintaining and deploying a monolith. Yes, rebuilding your monolith into microservices will definitely help. Nope, it won’t make sense if you have to manually provision your application and infrastructure and you’re still based on Windows 2008 (the Standard one).

Nowadays we have a lot (and honestly too many) ways to follow the modern infrastructure/software provisioning guidelines, but obviously, these are just tools. If you’re still reasoning in “manual” terms, like manually creating VMs to host your services, you’re definitely not thinking like a DevOps.
You’re not a SysAdmin, nor a Developer. DevOps doesn’t actually mean that you are both at the same time. It’s about taking their reasoning-model to another, flexible level and mix them to create a new way of thinking leaving behind the old-fashioned model.

DevOps it’s about constantly search new and more clever ways to think and do stuff. It’s not about remaining tied to what was working, or just knowing the latest ultra-cool DevOps’ tool that everyone’s using. Everything, from your code to your reasoning model, has to fly high to new landscapes.

It’s a matter of always trying new solutions, explore all the possibilities and mutate in base of what fits for the job. We could say that is a matter of imagination, uh? And you know, imagination comes from your mind. That’s why, for me, DevOps is not just a tech stack.
It’s a mindset.

But these are my 2 cents. Maybe 3.