The

DevOps
Mindset:
Real-World Insights
from Tech Leaders
THE DEVOPS MINDSET REAL-WORLD INSIGHTS FROM TECH LEADERS 2

INTRODUCTION Without Cross-Functionality and Flexibility, DevOps Just Wont Work

As an IT professional, you know that reacting quickly to customer demand

and achieving a faster speed to market is a top priority. This kind of agility
requires a continual cycle of release and adjustment, and keeping up with it
depends on how well your Development and Operations departments can
collaborate. Achieving the necessary collaboration isnt always easy. But it
is out of the necessity for it and the efforts required to achieve it that the
DevOps movement has risen.

The speed-to-market benefits of DevOps are becoming widely known, and

more companies are interested in adopting such a system as part of their
own infrastructure if they havent done so already. You might think some
new piece of hardware or software is what you need. Yet the agility that
companies seek isnt a tangible product. You cant buy DevOps in a box,
explains Kevin Behr, author and Chief Science Officer at Praxis Flow.

Certain facets have to be in place for DevOps to function, and the number
one factor is having a company culture in which it can thrive. To understand
the importance of culture, consider how DevOps can function within an
organization: Basically, it is both a social system and a technical system a
Socio-Technical System, Behr elaborates, and what DevOps does is bring
the social more in balance with the technical than it has been in the past.

The culture that can foster the DevOps mindset has to exist throughout a
company, not just within a single department, so people can collectively
contribute all their skills to solving problems. One of the key elements of
making DevOps successful, Behr emphasizes, is actually making sure that
it is part of an organizational plan. Organizations that want to be successful
with DevOps typically transition away from managing tasks to managing

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THE DEVOPS MINDSET REAL-WORLD INSIGHTS FROM TECH LEADERS 3

boundaries cross-functionally. Otherwise, DevOps can become a local

optimization.

If you want to transcend the status quo and reach new standards, you
must be willing to do what it takes to stay competitive. Flexibility is the
key, Behr says. You need that flexibility not just because of choice, but
because, now more than ever, the market is dictating it.

So, How Do You Do DevOps?

Weve established that DevOps wont lead to any significant results if

the right circumstances arent in place. So how do you achieve the right
circumstances? You must remove silos that prevent your teams from
optimizing their collective tech strength. You need to clarify your goals and
limitations, and also strike a balance between technology and employee
interaction.

The key thing to be thinking of here is the mindset angle of DevOps: the
collaboration, the measurement, the sharing, says Behr. By balancing
the social and technical side of things, you can actually get much faster
feedback loops in your learning process and in your development and
operational processes. You can actually learn, advance and iterate much
quicker. But if you dont develop those sides equally, what you get is
automation without any thought or a lot of collaboration without any real
traction toward achieving your companys goals.

Rackspace contacted several technology leaders with DevOps experience

to talk about the trials of adoption and the successes of implementation.
This ebook showcases their perspectives, examines challenges and
achievements, and offers suggestions these experts recommend for other
organizations looking to adopt the DevOps mindset.

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THE DEVOPS MINDSET REAL-WORLD INSIGHTS FROM TECH LEADERS 4

Q&A with Jim Kimball

Why did you decide on DevOps? What was the catalyst to get you
started down the DevOps path?

We had been doing monthly releases since we started our business. As we

grew, we kept doing monthly releases even though they started to involve
more and more ceremony with more and more people. Finally, during one
release we had issues that got us all in the room together and our CEO just
said enough was enough. He kind of woke us up to the fact that we had
outgrown our process. We were forced to look at it fresh.
Jim Kimball
What are the essential components of DevOps?
Chief
Technology For us, it is an understanding of the different perspectives of all the people
Officer involved. I come from a development background, and I admit I didn't really
look "over the wall" to understand what was going on with our tech guys. It

HedgServ turns out they were scrambling to deal with whatever everyone else in the
organization threw at them. And in the process they were forced to learn
how to adapt in a world where they had little to no control.
Location:
New York/Ireland
When something broke, it was so easy to point it out after the fact, and
I was as critical as anyone, asking things like, "How could this happen?"
Company snapshot:
without understanding that it was unfair to ask this of the people being
HedgeServ is a global,
swamped by it.
independent fund
administrator.

Size of organization:
App. 700

KPIs tied to DevOps:

"None. Our DevOps initiative is
not about KPIs. It is about how
we work."

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THE DEVOPS MINDSET REAL-WORLD INSIGHTS FROM TECH LEADERS 5

"If senior One aspect of embracing DevOps is we learned that we had created the
system that caused this, and so we were then in a position to start to
management has correct it.

a desire to work How long did it take you to get from beginning the transition to the

differently and point when you were doing DevOps successfully?

an understanding I think the fundamental shift toward DevOps started when we got away
from focusing on individual team goals and elevated our conversation to
of the challenges organizational goals and let the teams drive toward them, probably a little
over a year ago. I suspect that could be called the beginning of our DevOps
of the people journey.
doing the work,
And now we have learned to communicate these goals in the form of
DevOps can intents, with leaders of cross-functional teams able to determine how to
achieve those intents. It has been amazing to watch this happen. We still
happen." have a long way to go. We are still experiencing frustration from people
wanting and trying to do good but not knowing how. When that goes away,
I would say we are doing DevOps successfully.

Are you seeing an improvement in cycle time, go-to-market speeds,

customer satisfaction? If so, how are you measuring and tracking the
improvement?

We are exploring ways in which we can measure our improvements, but I'm
not really satisfied with the measures I've seen and how they might apply
to us. My current observations of success are drawn from the behavior I see
in the people in our technology group, how their attitude is changing. For
example, the programmers have a blog where they describe how failures
occurred for all to learn from. We are just now wrapping up our new server
build, which was a combined effort between programmers and IT. While
that in itself is awesome, the even cooler thing is the fact that a whole new
avenue of conversation has opened up.

We recently had a case where one of our libraries was causing trouble
when we had multiple versions of our main application installed on the
same server. The programmer investigating reached out to the IT team
to ask about migrating this library into the base build instead of being
packaged with the app. That solution path would never have been explored
a year ago.

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THE DEVOPS MINDSET REAL-WORLD INSIGHTS FROM TECH LEADERS 6

Did you run into roadblocks when you began your DevOps
implementation? If so, how did you navigate around them?

I would love to say that the journey has been smooth, but there are
roadblocks everywhere. You want to just point out to someone, "Hey,
look at thishere is a better way to work that will make your life more
rewarding" and they just jump at it, but it doesn't work that way.

I have been very fortunate to have a team of leaders who are willing to try
things with me and learn with me. Together we have worked with our teams
to ease people along the path to where we want to go.

Are repeatability and scalability important to your organization? How

does doing DevOps help you achieve those things?

Repeatability and scalability are our business. The capabilities that DevOps
gives us directly enable this by encouraging collaboration within the
organization to come up with better solutions.

The library example I gave above would have been solved by the
developers a year ago. It's not like the problem wouldn't have been solved
prior to our DevOps experiences, but it would have been solved within the
team silo and the solution would have been fragile.

I bet money that a solution developed the old way would have worked
for three years until one of the assumptions it made bit us. Getting more
robust solutions to all of the little problems is how DevOps helps us with
both scalability and reliability.

What DevOps myths (were too big, were not in Silicon Valley,
what we do isnt scalable) have you personally dispelled in your
transition to DevOps?

Perhaps the biggest one for us is that we are a Windows shop, and there
has traditionally been a bias toward Linux as the one true DevOps platform.
I can say with certainty that is not the case.

What would you recommend to another company interested in

beginning a DevOps implementation?

I would say it is okay to not know the answers. I feel one of the biggest
challenges in IT can sometimes be working with groups within and outside
your organization who expect certainty. Even if you don't know the path,
learn the goal and begin the journey.

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THE DEVOPS MINDSET REAL-WORLD INSIGHTS FROM TECH LEADERS 7

Q&A with James Kenigsberg

Whats the first step toward beginning a DevOps collaboration?

The first step is opening up the lines of communication between your

teams. Remember, the term DevOps is a blend of developers and
operations, bringing two silos together. So to achieve true DevOps
collaboration, you need your employees to really think and act as one, not
just be merged together in name only.

By pushing communication from the start, everyone gets a better feel for
James others needs and how they do their jobs. Then they take those things into
Kenigsberg account while doing their own jobs working not just for themselves.

Chief What are the essential components of DevOps?

Technology
Officer  Automation: If you're doing something more than twice, you should
think about converting it into an automated task. Automation ensures
your process is repeatable and reliable; it standardizes the execution of
2U, Inc. the task to the best way every time, without any risk of deviations from
peer-reviewed code to improve the process for the whole team.
Location:
Landover, Maryland Transparency: Transparency gets employees from these groups
to take an intimate look into what the others are doing, improving
Company snapshot: communications and business processes for all, not just for those in
2U, Inc., specializes in online your department.
university programs offered
through a cloud-based  Talent:
You want employees who put business needs, efficiencies, and
software-as-a-service (SaaS) automation before their historical knowledge of how hardware works,
platform. and don't draw a line in the sand between IT and developers. Before
digging in to solve a problem, they talk to co-workers elsewhere who
Size of organization: may have solved the problem in the past. Above all, they are working
App. 575 with the goal of the entire company in mind, not just the tasks at hand.

Annual revenue:
What kind of culture existed in your organization before you
"$83 million for year ended
transitioned to DevOps? Did it change? If so, how did you facilitate
12/31/2013."
that change?

KPIs tied to DevOps:

From the beginning, our company culture relied heavily on great
"The number and speed of
communication. We had a few employees wearing many hats, but everyone
deployments; number of
collaborated together extremely well so that there was never a disconnect.
contributors across the board
I think this was paramount when we began our DevOps shift because we
who can work and contribute
already had a sense of transparency. Our initial employees were able to
to our source code."
help breed the DevOps culture as our staff grew because they had been
thriving in it already for some time.
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THE DEVOPS MINDSET REAL-WORLD INSIGHTS FROM TECH LEADERS 8

"To achieve Is there a specific approach that will make the transition to DevOps
less painful?
true DevOps
The team that trains together stays together your teams should
collaboration, constantly cross-train across various departments. Your developers should
you need your know how QA departments work, and your IT operations group should
be aware of the needs of the developers. Employees in general must be
employees to aware of everyone else's needs so they can work in silos but still have the
transparency and communication necessary to be productive.
really think and
act as one, not What DevOps myths (were too big, were not in Silicon Valley,
what we do isnt scalable) have you personally dispelled in your
just be merged transition to DevOps?

together in We arent located in Silicon Valley. Our company headquarters is in

name only." Landover, Maryland, but our tech team is in New York City. So we dont
have that Silicon Valley feel that everyone talks about, yet we have still
been able to attract top-tier talent and incredible workers because they
believe in our company mission and what we are doing at 2U.

You don't have to be in Silicon Valley to embrace the DevOps culture;

anyone can do it from anywhere if you have the right people. In fact, many
new Silicon Valley firms these days have a bad habit of building shiny
technology because it is shiny, which goes against the DevOps principles
of communication and transparency. It shows that you aren't listening to
the needs of the business, or being open with the business about your
development goals.

What would you recommend to another company interested in

beginning a DevOps implementation?

Align your tech department with your business needs. We have areas
specifically aligned with the business (those responsible for learning tools
are in Learning Systems; those who run the backend are on Business
Systems).

Each area is fully loaded with a full stack of every role needed for a full
software development lifecycle. Because employees are aligned to the
business mission, it makes them not just people completing tasks, but turns
them into a nucleus of your company to achieve your mission. Its not about
the amount of code they write or tickets that they close; it becomes their
goal to achieve the mission of the company.

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THE DEVOPS MINDSET REAL-WORLD INSIGHTS FROM TECH LEADERS 9

Q&A with Jeff Hackert

Was there a particular point in time that you started doing DevOps,
or has that always been part of the culture there?

No, it has not always been part of the culture. When I joined the company
a few years ago, we were 400 people. In the last two years, we have
grown to nearly 2,000, so the growth has been substantial. That growth
has been matched by growth of our infrastructure. So the original way the
infrastructure had been growing before I had come on at Riot, Ops was cut
off from developers and the rest of the organization, and there were a few
Jeff Hackert intermediary organizations that became primarily responsible for the build
of our software and a team that was responsible for deployment. They
Engineering were not organized together in any meaningful way, and they were not
Manager communicating.

Riot Games Was there a particular catalyst at Riot Games that got you started
down the DevOps path, or how did you come to do things in a more
collaborative way?
Location:
Santa Monica, CA (HQ)
When I got to Riot, there was a culture of certain personal heroics in
Company snapshot:
operations, but the cost was quite high and the resulting silos turned into
Riot Games is a game studio
some real challenges. The team that I started working with that really
that develops and produces
had a lot to do with this change was working with infrastructure; they
multiplayer online games,
were working specifically with Chef, but it was a small team of software
including League of Legends.
developers working to implement technology that both developers and the
operations team needed to participate, and there was no scenario in which
Size of organization: the silos could remain and we could reach any kind of definition of success.
App. 2,000 So this idea of building up or bringing DevOps into the organization was
just a natural extension of those activities.
KPIs tied to DevOps:
"We have KPIs for any How did you facilitate that change? How did you get people to come
endeavors, but we dont think out of their silos and be more collaborative and communicative?
about projects with that
moniker. We think of DevOps I will say that I dont know that, from my own side, I can claim responsibility
as a culture topic more than for having achieved those things. What I can say is that I definitely brought
as a class or designation or that conversation out into the open and forced real reflection around their
project." practices simply because I was standing in the middle between multiple
parties and had the opportunity to force that conversation.

Among the people that I worked with, I actively confronted a number of

assumptions that underlay how we were doing our day-to-day work. These
conversations translated into slogans like, No snowflakes. The idea of
the no-snowflake environment is that software engineers and systems

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"We had to engineers would not log onto a single box where there are a thousand
boxes that all shared a set of attributes. We would not log onto a single
flip the model, box in production and alter its configuration, no matter how beneficial that
change seemed to be. Instead, we would focus on cookbooks or recipes
from the idea of and the software expression of that node, or that group of nodes, as a way

personal heroics to resolve it.

and siloed Do you feel that you are doing DevOps? Would you describe the
environment, the culture, there as a DevOps shop?
responsibilities
to real, cross- Yeah, after nearly two years of very active conversations, we no longer have
what you would call a traditional Ops organization. By any sort of objective
functional measurement of what DevOps is from a culture perspective, we lie in that
model. But we do not refer to ourselves as doing or being DevOps.
collaboration."
The people who are doing DevOps often arent saying that theyre
doing it. So thats definitely in line with what weve heard from other
people.

Making DevOps a tool issue, or making DevOps a set of defined practices,

will only get you where we have gotten with every other system like this,
which is that we violate what we care about most. So if youre hiring smart
people, were breaking the value of those hires when we limit or constrain
their creative intelligence in terms of problem solving.

What needed to happen for Riot to get where it needed to go, to be able
to manage at the scale were running at, which is pretty big, we would
want not to constrain artificially the creative intelligence of the people
working in that system. We want the purest expression of peoples creative
intelligence.

We want to honor and respect their abilities, not demean them by putting
artificial labels on practices they should define and hold. However, we do

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want to create a culture in which theyre solving real problems. We had to

flip the model, from the idea of personal heroics and siloed responsibilities
to real, cross-functional collaboration.

What might you recommend to another company that is going

through the same sort of growing pains that Riot Games did?

That they have faith in their hiring practices, and that they have real
empathy and compassion for the people theyve hired. When you execute
on a really good hire, which should be all the time, every person you bring
in is bringing a set of experiences and a set of goals that they want to
achieve. So you dont want to stand in their way. What you want to do is to
guide or facilitate that creative output to solve the real problems that your
business is facing. If were talking about operations and infrastructure, the
idea of DevOps unlocks that, but it is not a set of proscriptions or
a recipe that will give you a defined best practices outcome.

Things like best practices will probably end up hurting you more than they
will help you. Your best practice is the collective wisdom of the very smart
people youve hired to solve your problems. And if what you have is a
siloed or broken environment, you want to increase the communication, not
impose new rules.

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Q&A with Bharat Krish

Do you describe yourself as "doing DevOps?"

We gather requirements, we design, we develop, we deploy and we score

it. It's end-to-end product development. We have an internal software
development organization and a digital products organization. We also
employ development consulting companies outside in helping the effort,
but right now we lead the effort.

And do these teams work seamlessly with each other, or do they each
Bharat Krish have their defined responsibilities with no crossover?

Vice President, Theres a considerable amount of overlap. Its a startup culture, and a lot
Information of times people roll up their sleeves to get things done, so you might find
Technology my software developers who develop a product supporting the product
as well. If they dont have involvement in support, they may not know the

HBO context behind what they're buildingthey wouldnt know how to enhance
the product. So its intentional that I encourage the culture of overlap.
Latin America
Did that overlap exist before, or is this something youve
Location: encouraged? How did that culture come about?
Coral Gables, Florida

It has been an evolution. The company has grown considerably. When a

Company snapshot: company starts out, everybodys doing everything, but over time we had
HBO Latin America is a cable built a number of teams, and now its become more of an institution that
television network serving we have to have them overlap, and its part of our operating procedure. Its
Spanish-speaking audiences institutionalized now that if you build something you get to lead it, and you
in Central and South America, also get to support it.
and the Caribbean.

Its a cultural aspect that I continue to enrich all the time. In a large
Size of organization: organization, silos are built naturally. Part of my job is to break those silos
App. 800 on a constant basis and establish that overlap.

KPIs tied to DevOps: You talked about the developers being involved with the support
"None specifically
of the product. Does this lead to better end products and
tied to DevOps."
faster improvement and therefore an increase in your customer
satisfaction?

The nature of our business is that the products are evolving so fast, we see
it as building a quality product that meets the needs of the brand. In the
case of HBO, a premium entertainment brand, it needs to have a premium-
quality experience, whether its user experience or graphical representation
or content. Were consistently striving for a quality that will be measured on
how the audience lives the brand.
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"In a large Do you feel that your developers, because you give them that
ownership, are able to live the brand and really care about it?
organization,
We want everybody to be successful, and thats a baseline, but mistakes are
silos are built encouraged. I always tell my team were not running an emergency room

naturally. Part here, so don't be afraid of making mistakes. It takes multiple iterations to
build something that has the quality of our brand written all over it, and it
of my job is to also takes multiple iterations to build something thats simple.

break those silos Its in the DNA of most of my team members that they are willing to take
that step and propose ideas and not have the fear of people thinking that
on a constant the ideas may be stupid or not encouraged. When I think of a DevOps

basis." culture, for me its building a foundation where development can happen in
a more agile fashion, so I focus on the foundation more than anything else.

How do you focus on the foundation? Is that through your hiring

practices, through training?

Multiple things. Just a week ago, we did a workshop with all my managers
and part of that workshop was to reiterate the culture that we need to build
and maintain within the organization. I look at it as five things: Keep things
simple. Focus on managing people, supporting them, directing and training
them. Be humble. Respect everyone. Have integrity.

By creating those core values, the expectation is, we will have a lot more
people talking to each other about new ideas, not afraid to make mistakes
and being honest about the work. In this sense its going to reflect in a
great product, in tackling a lot of the competition in our industry or how
consumer behaviors change, being able to think out of the box and come
up with solutions.

Thats the culture were promoting, and its working. There are times we do
have things that we need to fix, and new employees bring a lot of baggage
with them that needs to be reset. Its a work in progress, but overall from
my experience working with multiple companies, Ive cracked the nutshell
on trying to be more innovative because of the cultural values that weve
implemented.

What would you recommend to another company who is interested in

beginning a DevOps implementation?

Do not look at software development or support as a playbook that you

can bring wherever you go. You have to first understand the culture of the
company, the people, the customers you serve, and it also depends on the

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THE DEVOPS MINDSET REAL-WORLD INSIGHTS FROM TECH LEADERS 14

region. Latin America is very different from the U.S., which is very different
from Europe, which is very different from Asia.

All that needs to be understood and also understand the senior

management, what are the strategic revenue opportunities theyre thinking
about, and based on that, hire the right people, build the right culture, and
track the right metrics.

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SUMMING UP Creating a Path Toward Continual Collaboration

As with the tech experts portrayed here, youll have your own reasons for
moving from a siloed IT department to an agile DevOps model. You might
recognize you need to achieve greater efficiency or want to reach new
levels of productivity. Whatever the motivation, your companys culture will
be the deciding factor in whether DevOps will be successful for you.

To do DevOps, you dont need to create a new department, but you do

need to take a look at the culture on your team and throughout your
organization. Is your company maximizing your IT professionals collective
skills and expertise? If not, is that because your companys established
IT conventions are limiting productivity and therefore growth? These are
tough questions and answering them will take time and commitment. You
have to answer these questions, though, to start the conversation and to
address the issues at stake.

The agility thats necessary for continual software deployment must be

based upon a company infrastructure that encourages IT departments
to see themselves as part of a larger team. And youll never build that
infrastructure without creating the path toward the right mindset.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Rackspace would like to thank all contributors for lending their
valuable time and insights to this project:

Kevin Behr
Chief Science Officer
Praxis Flow
Co-Author of The Phoenix Project

Jim Kimball
Chief Technology Officer
HedgeServ

James Kenigsberg
Chief Technology Officer
2U, Inc.

Jeff Hackert
Engineering Manager
Riot Games

Bharat Krish
VP, Information Technology
HBO Latin America

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THE DEVOPS MINDSET REAL-WORLD INSIGHTS FROM TECH LEADERS 17

This eBook is for informational purposes only; all statements and

information are provided "AS IS" and are presented WITHOUT WARRANTY
OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.

Rackspace is either a registered service mark or service mark of Rackspace

US, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

Third-party trademarks and tradenames appearing in this document are

the property of their respective owners. Such third-party trademarks have
been printed in caps or initial caps and are used for referential purposes
only. We do not intend our use or display of other companies' tradenames,
trademarks, or service marks to imply a relationship with, or endorsement
or sponsorship of us by, these other companies.

DOCUMENT DATE: AUGUST 2014

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