Are you really “DevOps”? You have spent years going through an amazing transformation. You claim that you are now officially “DevOps”. But, what now? Your customers don’t really care if you are a DevOps shop/factory; they care about how your products –built from that shop/factory– add value to their lives. Common sense stuff, right? Well, unfortunately, no. You’d be surprised as to how many people still quite don’t get what the true spirit of DevOps is. You often hear things like: “We are a team of developers doing operations - we are DevOps!”, or “We are a Dev team continually deploying to production - we are DevOps!”.

While all the above are not false claims, they fail to draw a complete picture of what DevOps is truly about.The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear them is, “Well, all this is great, but now what? Who are you doing all this for? All these changes to your culture, process, and tools for whom? Where do your customers fit into all this? How are all these changes impacting your customers? Most importantly, what are you learning about your customers?”

Come find out more as I explain why and how “DevOps” is more about customer feedback and quick learning than just culture/process/tools. I will focus on four major “DevOps” patterns (from a customer’s perspective); I will throw in some anti-patterns as well while I am at it. These are insights I have gathered over more than a decade of operating some of the top internet sites and games in the world.