In the DevOps realm, the success and effectiveness of all initiatives depend on the coordinated integration of both people and technology. Focusing on just one is not going to reap many benefits. By recognizing the importance of both, organizations can unlock the full potential of DevOps, resulting in faster software delivery life cycles with increased quality and reliability.
People drive the cultural and collaborative aspects of DevOps. They bring their skills and expertise to drive a mindset of shared responsibility, continuous improvement, and effective communication. Technology, on the other hand, provides the necessary tooling, automation, and infrastructure management to support this mindset. Software delivery approaches such as CI, CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) empower teams to improve the overall efficiency of delivering code to the customers.
With DevOps, people reach for tooling too quickly. Before they do that, they need to ensure the right foundations of – culture and working model. Once people are aligned with the value and benefits of both, they will be motivated to adopt the required technology changes and ways of working by themselves. In this chapter, we will focus on the two pillars – people and technology – and what you can do in the AWS world to set up your teams for success. Additionally, I will introduce you to some resources that you can leverage for continuous learning and enablement of your DevOps teams. Adoption of AWS often opens up new opportunities to innovate and sometimes even leads to role transitions within the company. Toward the end of this chapter, we will cover a basic learning path that you could consider for yourself or other team members who would like to get more involved in DevOps on AWS.
Our agenda for this chapter is as follows:
- Building a collaborative and agile team setup and culture
- Technology best practices and considerations for success
- Resources to support AWS learning and development
- Learning path for transitioning into DevOps roles
Building a collaborative team setup and culture
Adopting DevOps practices is easier said than done. A fundamental problem that most organizations struggle with is looking at tools and automation as the golden solution to all their problems – or even worse, hiring DevOps engineers from the market and embedding them into existing teams, hoping that they will introduce automations and cloud services that will magically address all gaps. Before going this route, they first need to ensure people readiness. In this section, we will discuss the various aspects of building an effective team structure that supports successful DevOps implementation across your organization. We will focus on the importance of fostering a culture of collaboration and effective communication that, in turn, drives value creation for customers.