There’s lots of great DevOps literature around.
Excellent, insighful, practical books like, say, the DevOps Handbook, or the rightfully acclaimed Accelerate.
But for all their merits, they feel like they have one flaw: they make DevOps seem so easy, and straight-forward, and simple.
In reality DevOps can be hard and confusing.
And books that make it seem straight-forward feel almost accusatory: “It’s so obvious. Why can’t you pull it off?”. In a weird way, the high quality of the books, and the arguments presented, is their Achilles heel: they can be intimidating.
To be sure, they never write (and, I’m sure, never insinuate) such things. Yet… this feeling of intimidation has been shared by many I’ve talked to about DevOps.
It can feel almost like a miracle diet, claiming to allow you to drop rolls like suitcases after a holiday. Yet here you are, toiling at shedding your excess weight pound by hard-won pound.
This is exactly why I kicked off my DevOps research project: I wanted to find out what DevOps feels like for the people out there, and how to help them move ahead.
Because just like diets take place in your head, not in your stomach (for the most part), DevOps is really a matter of mindset, culture, looking at things the right way.
And just like with diets, regular folks will sometimes encounter setbacks when working on their DevOps practice.
That’s fine; not everything goes according to plan.
And just like counting calories isn’t always paramount, you don’t need to feel bad about doing things differently from how you feel you ought to.
The DevOps police won’t come for you, I promise.
Just keep improving – and if you look back after a year or so, you may be amazed how far you’ve come without really noticing.