The Opening Ceremony

The winter games are back again! *cues the Olympic anthem* In celebration, we asked the DevOps Institute community if DevOps was an Olympic event, which sport would it be? Arguably, DevOps fundamentals can be seen in almost every team sport. 

The Main Events

Helen Beal, Chief Ambassador, UK

“Snowboarding – all the tricks are patterns and practices we learn to help us get to the bottom of the slope (the delivery of the value stream) as fast and cleanly as possible.”

Vishnu Vasudevan, Head of Product, Opsera Inc, USA

“Relay Race – pass the baton once the goal is completed, just like the CI/CD pipelines.” 

Tracy Ragan, CEO, DeployHub, USA

“DevOps pipelines are like the Biathlon relay race. The team goal is to get the baton over the line as fast as possible, with a requirement of relying on four main players – Continuous Integration, Continuous Build, Continuous Testing, and Continuous Deployment. Continuous Delivery is how it is done by passing the baton from one runner to the next.”

Najib Radzuan, DevOps Consultant, DevOps4Me Global, Malaysia

“Football – It’s a strategy and teamwork sport that requires proper formation to face challenges. In the meantime, it also needs a lot of practice with a different set of formations. The game’s end goal is always to get goals and win every challenge/game.”

Pradip Ghosh, Business Consultant, Tech Mahindra Ltd., India

“Football/Hockey or any Team Game – DevOps is a whole team effort. As we can’t think of winning such a team game (football/hockey/volleyball etc.) without a whole team effort, similarly, we can’t truly achieve DevOps goal without a proper strategy and a whole team effort. Ultimately the main goal of DevOps is to promote collaboration, remove silos and aim for the team goal.”

Mark Peters, Product Manager, BrainGu, USA

“Bobsled – Everyone knows the start, end, and some of the places in the middle.  However, we still need a good start and continued coordination throughout to prevent crashing.”

Simone Jo Moore, HumanisingIT, SJM, France

“Slalom skiing – you need great flexibility and adaptability to make the shorter and sharper turns and the agility to deal with the unexpected shifts in the environment, including developing enabling constraints in pushing those boundaries just like we push the gate poles on the downhill run. Add a few moguls in there, and you’ll also realise the depth of resilience DevOps brings when you need to sustain the joints to maintain the flow. The speed we attain and helping the business get ahead and stay in front of the competition is dependent on our ability to execute the competency in both these aspects.”

Tracy Bannon, Senior Principal – Architect & DevOps Advisor, The MITRE Corporation, USA

“Biathlon – Software Engineering and DevOps are much like the Biathlon with the need to merge and align what, at first glance, would seem to be two wildly different focus areas: cross country skiing and shooting at speed! The Biathlon has a speed component as well, adding to the complexity. It’s not one skill; it is many, aligned with a focus on speed. That sounds like DevOps to me!” 

Eveline Oehrlich, Chief Research Officer, DevOps Institute, Industry Analyst, Research In Action, Germany

“Freestyle skiing – DevOps is like Freestyle skiing as it is a combination of a variety of principles, concepts and styles across different value streams. It can consist of one team doing one thing e.g., CI/CD (like a skier doing aerial flips and spins) and other things such as SRE (like a skier sliding rails and boxes). There is no perfect way and the governing body (ISF) or in DevOps the different outcomes which judge the performance.”  

The Closing Ceremony

DevOps is the key enabler for digital transformation along with cloud computing. The movement seeks to balance throughput with stability and optimize organizational performance. DevOps is multidimensional, encompassing human aspects, processes and frameworks, and tools and technology. To learn more about the fundamentals of DevOps, register for our upcoming events.

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