My PuppetConf Keynote: “Why We Need DevOps Now”

A couple months ago, I had the privilege of keynoting at PuppetConf 12.  The Puppet crew put together a fantastic two days of talks, and it was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with so many people in the DevOps tribe.

The first part of my 25 minute talk was about the downward spiral that happens in almost every IT organization, which impacts not only IT Operations, but also Development, Product Management and “the business,” which we’re all a part of.  It starts with fragile applications in production, resulting in the business missing the commitments it makes to the outside world, which then results in urgent, date-driven projects put into the Development queue.  This results in more fragile applications in production, and an ever increasing amount of technical debt, slowing down the organization, starving it of the ability to do productive work.

The second part of the presentation are six of my favorite prescriptive DevOps patterns, derived from the Three Ways, which we’re using to describe the principles that underpin DevOps.  They are:

1. Define work and make it visible.
2. Make environments available early.
3. Wake up developers (fast feedback loops).
4. Embed Dev into Ops (quality at the source).
5. Break things early and often.
6. Reserve 20% of cycles for technical debt reduction.

You can find out more about my upcoming book “The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win,” coming out on January 15.

- About The Authors

Gene Kim

Gene Kim is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, researcher, and multiple award-winning CTO. He has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999 and was the founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He is the author of six books, The Unicorn Project (2019), and co-author of the Shingo Publication Award winning Accelerate (2018), The DevOps Handbook (2016), and The Phoenix Project (2013). Since 2014, he has been the founder and organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit, studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.

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