JAX DevOps: Some people call DevOps a cultural movement, others consider it a magic bullet. In your view, what is the essence of DevOps?

Jason Bloomberg:

The essence of DevOps is empathy – empathy for other members of the team, empathy for members of other teams, empathy for people in the broader business, empathy for customers. For DevOps to be successful, organizations must break down silos, which requires greater cooperation. The key to cooperation: empathy.

JAX DevOps: What are the latest trends in DevOps? Could you describe one important trend that you are particularly interested in?

Bloomberg:

The most important DevOps trend is extending it beyond dev and ops. DevOps must include quality, of course. And DevOps must include security – SecDevOps. DevOps must include business stakeholders and the customer as well – BizDevOps or BizOps.

The key to cooperation: empathy.

JAX DevOps: What are the most suitable tools that should be part of a ready-to-use “DevOps kit”?

Bloomberg:

DevOps is not about the tools, so listing tools would be the wrong way to answer this question. There’s no question, however, that DevOps is a software-empowered movement. Leveraging better automation and software-defined capabilities to ‘shift left’ the entire software lifecycle is an integral part of the DevOps vision.

JAX DevOps: What is the role of cloud in a DevOps context? What benefits does it bring?

Bloomberg:

To achieve the software-defined, ‘shift left’ vision for DevOps, it’s essential for the operational environment to be fully abstracted and model driven. The cloud showed us that this was possible, and led the way. Today, cloud computing architectural principles – whether or not a particular instance actually gets deployed in the cloud – are essential to DevOps success.

The most important DevOps trend is extending it beyond dev and ops. 

JAX DevOps: If containers are revolutionizing IT infrastructure and DevOps is transforming the modern IT landscape, would you say that they go well together?

Bloomberg:

They certainly can go together, but this question belies a bottom-up mentality that is contrary to the DevOps way of thinking. The choice of infrastructure should be abstracted and dynamic, driven more by business policy and agility requirements than by technical choices.

JAX DevOps: What are the anti-patterns of DevOps?

Bloomberg:

The most dangerous anti-pattern is to think that DevOps is just about dev and ops!

Leveraging better automation and software-defined capabilities to ‘shift left’ the entire software lifecycle is an integral part of the DevOps vision.

JAX DevOps: Do you have a tip on how we can eliminate obstacles to DevOps adoption?

Bloomberg:

Spread what I call the ‘DevOps virus.’ Once the software development organization works out the kinks, they should actively evangelize the approach to the rest of the organization.