DevOps principles & tools are great but if we want to make it to the Promised Land we need to change our perspective. Products are only as strong as their weakest link. Fire fighting is inevitable if operational concerns don’t include the critical internal services our applications rely on. As DevOps enthusiasts, we spend a lot of time discussing key principles, such as CI/CD Pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, and the variety of tools that support them, but when we get down to it, how do we actually achieve these? Theres never enough time in a day when you’re racing to keep up with business requirements and experiencing death by a thousand shoulder taps. Shift left is more of a hard left for many teams, and business operations cant afford to slow down while we catch up. If we want to make it to the Promised Land, we need to, instead, shift our perspectives and view products as more than a sum of their features.

Working at a health technology company, stability is critical, as downtime or bugs could be the difference between life or death for a patient. Our days can easily fall into an endless cycle of working through dreaded sticky note walls, fighting fires based on the loudest voice in the room, and becoming the Ops villain we never wanted to be. The development of critical internal services (e.g. system infrastructure, logging, metrics, pipelines) need to be planned in tandem with the development of the products themselves. By shifting our perspectives, we make the time to plan for operational concerns from the start.

<img src=“https://assets.devopsdays.org/events/2019/toronto/JGrindrod_Journey.png" alt=“Graphic Recording Journey to the Promised Land”” />