HACKER Q&A
📣 david_

How to Sell the DevOps Mindset


I assume this has been done before: Does anyone know good presentations on how to convince a CTO to adopt more of a DevOps culture? Main worries will be around security (separation of duties, ...) and risking reliability (we are talking getting in trouble for deviating from 99.999% here).

Some background: Imagine you work in a company, you live your life happily with your ops friends: You are in the cloud, your rolling out more and more resources in terraform, your build pipeline is automated, tools are not bleeding edge but quite modern, you put hard work into automating as much as possible for your developer friends. You have all this with a few restrictions as you have quite sensitive data (that's also why you have a few security related certifications as an organization).

Then this very happy day comes along and you get rewarded for all the hard work and get acquired. The cool thing is you now have the chance to convince a much larger organisation about DevOps culture etc.

Pointers are appreciated!

Just to add maybe: The people working there are very smart and have successfully built a system which is above 99,999% in availability. They understand the benefits in an abstract way but are not sure how they can keep their reliability and security if they try to do things differently. I assume the goal of the presentation needs to be two things:

1. Showing that there is a way to get security and reliability even with DevOps

2. The hidden costs and risks to the business of not improving your processes and being able to introduce changes quickly and innovate


  👤 bifrost Accepted Answer ✓
Can you expand on what you mean by "DevOps" culture?

Developers doing operational stuff has traditionally not been great and Operations people doing SW development is usually less great; for a long time DevOps was the worst of both worlds. That said, CI is great, but CD is not so great and I know a lot of people who refer to it as "Continuously Down" heh.

For the most part having QA and/or Automated Testing will improve uptime and security. If you're leveraging standard infrastructure best practices you won't have to worry too much about platform security, if you're not you're going to need some help :)


👤 tzm
I've successfully used a tech radar to help organizations understand the hidden complexities and value of software / systems. It's been helpful to get alignment and priorities, etc.

https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/build-your-own-te...


👤 hitsurume
Is there a reason you want DevOps culture? Is the current process broken or unproductive in some way? Have you guys had security incidents before? Is there enough manpower / team bandwith for everyone to get on board with the new changes?