Comment by dstaheli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dstaheli | Hacker News Reader

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I like Donovan Brown's definition of DevOps:

http://donovanbrown.com/post/what-is-devops

"DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users."

"I am very deliberate in the terms used in this definition. I choose value over software. DevOps is not just automating a pipeline so we can quickly deliver software. Our goal is to deliver value. The term end users was also very carefully chosen. The value we produce must reach our end users. If the value only reaches the Dev and QA environments but is held up before reaching production where it can be realized by our end users, we are still failing."

"It is very important to realize that DevOps is not a product. You cannot buy DevOps and install it. DevOps is not just automation or infrastructure as code. DevOps is people following a process enabled by products to deliver value to our end users."

The issue that I have with that definition that it suffers from abstractionitis...

Just try replacing DevOps with just about any computing paradigm that entered the market in the last 5 years and hopefully you'll see what I mean. Care should be exercised to separate marketing out of product definitions. Focus on concrete, measurable improvements the product brings to the table rather than producing statements that are generally agreeable.

I'm also slightly peeved by use of the phrase "delivery of value" -so broad, so sterile, its almost as if its chosen as a result of a search for the least objectionable phrase. I think it smells of intellectual laziness to use terms that we don't care to define and conveniently enough punt to the almighty end user.

> "DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users."

That's not very specific, is it?

Not following on this. Something about value and unions and continuous delivery and process/products and other poop. Seems like someone wanted to whittle the overt jargon into incomprehensibility.

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