10 or 15 years ago we would hear “agile doesn’t work” from lots of people. They had “used agile” on a project, and the project failed anyway. Most of the time a little investigation revealed that they didn’t really try it at all. Instead they worked much like they always had, just for two weeks at a time instead of several months.

The same thing is happening with people “doing DevOps”.

I strongly believe that the most important thing about a DevOps transition is the required changes in culture. But you can’t actually have self organized teams if you’re working on systems that are hard to build and deploy. You also can’t easily automate that build and deploy process if your architecture is hard to test.

In this talk I’ll point out several areas of focus when making the transition, and point out why it’s important that you change everything.

Culture change - DevOps is about culture first and foremost. I’ll talk about some of the organizational structures which can help in creating a sharing culture where the teams and the technology can thrive.

Modern architecture - Adopting a technical architecture which is more testable and changeable is key to the ability to move fast. Taking advantage of microservices and platforms (such as PaaS) can help with this.

Continuous Delivery - Continuous Delivery is more than just automating deployment. Making sure your software is going through things like security, performance and compliance testing in addition to “standard” tests. I’ll show ways to make sure your deployments are not only fast, but safe.