Most people putting DevOps in place have only the foggiest notion of what it is beyond a “better mouse trap, and something about ‘culture.’” This talk uses failures and successes from DevOps-practicing organizations to give advice from the real world on practicing DevOps well.

“DevOps” has developed a broad definition that’s come to mean “whatever the things are we do that makes IT better.” While it’s annoying to have to spend the first 10 minutes of any conversation calibrating on what “DevOps” means, this points towards a broader need: organizations are desperate to improve how they create, deploy, and manage their custom written software. The goals of DevOps align perfectly with this need, though as organizations who try to “scale” DevOps are finding, DevOps doesn’t solve all of your problems. This talk will cover this framing of DevOps and then walk through several case studies of how (mostly large, but some medium and small) organizations are failing and succeeding at applying DevOps. In doing so, this talk provides advice for high level planning and then daily tactics for not only “doing the DevOps,” but improving the way organizations manage their stable of software.