Have you heard of the term DevOps,
but aren't really sure what all the fuss is about?
Or perhaps your organization is struggling in
a siloed organizational structure and as a result,
you're suffering through long sleepless nights during
release cycles and heard DevOps might be able to help?
Or maybe you've heard of DevOps being a solution for
companies struggling to maintain pace with
their competition by increasing time to market
while maintaining quality and lowering development costs.
Maybe you're thinking to yourself,
"I'm experiencing all of this but I'm not sure where to begin."
Whatever your reasons, welcome to our course on DevOps culture and mindset.
In this course, we'll explore all of these ideas and more.
Hello. My name is Courtney Kissler and I have been living and breathing
DevOps for the past seven years in leadership positions at Nordstrom,
Starbucks, and most recently as
the Vice President of Digital Platform Engineering at Nike.
For each organization, I've worked to establish key DevOps principles
and techniques that have helped to improve software development substantially.
Prior to working at these organizations,
I was an engineer at two startups where we
essentially practiced DevOps even though it wasn't called that back then.
As an engineer, I wrote,
tested, and deployed code.
I also supported it.
That's really the only way I knew how to operate.
When I started at Nordstrom,
it was the first large organization I worked in and it took
some adjustment for me to realize that in order to operate at scale,
we had very distinct roles and responsibilities.
I am very happy to see how the industry has evolved
and recognize that operating more like a startup is better.
By the time I started to get immersed in the DevOps community,
I had already moved into a senior leadership role.
Observing the grassroots efforts in the engineering community was inspirational.
What I learned is that having senior leadership support was
also critical to ensure the maximum value could be achieved.
My journey and focus has been on how I can evolve as a leader and support the practices
and principles and demonstrate through
actions that I am also committed to operating differently.
I've had the opportunity to lead
multiple transformations within a lot of different teams.
Some were delivering digital experiences,
some were working on packaged applications,
some on the mainframe.
All of this has given me a very broad and deep understanding of
how to adjust my approach depending on the team and situation.
I've also had the opportunity to share stories and what I've learned over the years at
multiple conferences such as DevOps Days Rockies Columbus, Seattle.
The DevOps Enterprise Summit.
All day DevOps, LISA,
DevSecOps, London, and Velocity.
Most of my talks are available on YouTube if you'd like to check them out.
I'm also on the programming committee for the DevOps Enterprise Summit and participate
in the DevOps Enterprise Forum which is a small group that meets annually to give
back to the DevOps community by producing free materials responding to
the biggest problems we are hearing from
the speakers and attendees at the DevOps Enterprise Summit.
I also have a case study in the O'Reilly publication, DevOps in practice,
I'm referenced in the DevOps handbook and I've been
on the DevOps Cafe and Goat Farm podcasts.
Most recently, I wrote the foreword for Accelerate and I continue to learn
every day and have been very fortunate to have
a community to lean on and leverage when I need help.
I am extremely passionate about Lean,
building a culture of continuous learning,
and being a lifelong learner,
and constantly challenging myself to experiment and push myself out of my comfort zone.
One of the reasons I'm your instructor for this online course.
In this course, we're going to go over the basic foundational principles of
DevOps with a particular focus on culture and the DevOps mindset.
You'll learn about DevOps origins in Lean principles and how it can help
improve collaboration between developers and operation team members.
You'll be introduced to DevOps models and principles that are informed by experts
like Demming and Westrim and grounded in the work by thought leaders such as John Willis,
Damon Edwards, Dr. Nicole Forecegrinn,
Jess Humble, and Gene Kim.
You'll be exposed to ideas regarding systems thinking, feedback loops,
continuous improvement, loosely coupled architecture,
and teams, managing risk,
and dealing with unplanned work.
You'll learn about strategies to manage work,
monitor it, keep it organized,
and maintain a high level of quality by following
key DevOps principles such as the three ways,
A3 problem-solving, and improvement Kata.
We'll discuss various organizational models and
structures that are used by companies and their DevOps transformations.
You'll learn about value stream mapping and ensuring continuous workflow.
Above all, with our time together,
you'll walk away with some key ideas and tactics
that you can employ at your own organizations to
increase both time to market and value for
your customers no matter your product line or industry.
Throughout this course, I'll be sharing
some specific examples and case studies from each of the companies I've worked
for so you can get some ideas on how to best
implement DevOps principles and tenants where you work.
Each of the companies I've worked for during my career has offered
interesting challenges and opportunities that you can learn from.
This course is fairly non-technical compared to
the other courses that make up our DevOps specialization.
In this course, we're focused much more on culture change and leveraging
the will and work of our employees than any of the other courses in this series.
As I say often,
DevOps isn't really about the specific software you're
developing or the various languages you're relying upon.
At the end of the day,
DevOps is about people.
The greatest asset any organization has.
As such, the format of the course is primarily video lecture-based with a lot of in-video
and end of module quiz questions to make sure you're
able to understand and apply the concepts we're discussing.
While it helps to be familiar with development and operations
in some contexts going through this course,
you don't really have to know much about DevOps,
in particular, to do well in this course.
We're really focused on discussing the fundamentals here in the hopes to be
a launchpad to whatever direction your personal DevOps journey takes you.
I really believe that complete DevOps novices,
as well as people who have been dabbling in DevOps for
a number of years will find something in this course.
Other than the knowledge check quizzes I mentioned,
there are two peer-reviewed projects as a part of
this course that will allow you to practice describing and
explaining the merits of moving your organization to
a DevOps culture and mindset to your organization's leaders.
You'll be exposed to a lot of information in this course,
including a ton of information on why DevOps principles can help
organizations deliver software faster and cheaper while still maintaining quality.
These two peer-reviewed projects will allow you
the opportunity to explore these ideas further in order for you to come up
with a convincing rationale for your organizational leaders on
why you should consider shifting to a DevOps culture and mindset.
If you spend some time on producing these artifacts,
you'll likely be able to later revise and use them directly
in the real world by sharing them with your organizational leadership.
Of course, this course just represents the fundamentals.
If you want to do a deeper dive,
I encourage you to check out the classes my colleagues have produced as
part of the entire UC Davis DevOps specialization.
Each of them tackles a particular aspect of DevOps in depth,
continuous integration, deployment and automation, for example.
My colleagues have done an excellent job of covering
the many facets of DevOps that we only get to touch on in this course.
In order to be successful in this course,
I highly encourage you to watch and do everything in the order as presented.
Most of the concepts I discuss build upon one another.
So, it's a good idea to have a firm grasp of one topic before moving on to the next.
All right. Once again, welcome.
As you can probably tell,
I'm really excited about this course.
I'm glad you've joined me because we're going to learn a lot together. Let's get started.
