Continuous delivery and Devops - A quickstart guide

Since years, we have the devops movement and short afterward came the continuous delivery. Of course those concepts are linked but I didn’t found anyone arguing in this direction nor being able to underline the global approach and the not technical impacts of the change to implement CD. Continuous Delivery and Devops - A Quickstart Guide is presenting this.

I’m not a big fan of the title: too many buzz words with a promise that the explanations won’t go deep and perhaps be cut. But that’s wrong. The title should have been something like “Continuous delivery and devops - how to implement this enterprise shift”.

Because that’s the true subjects of this book: change management and how to make the shift in the enterprise culture to welcome the change before it’s too late. Of course the target is to implement continuous delivery in a devops way but it’s only the target.

The first four chapters are not technical and just about organization [Chap. 1], common sense of agile and scrum (no knowledge needed and the notions are named only at the end of the book) and how to challenge your ideas to solve a painful situation [Chap 3.]. It’s mostly about humans.

It’s the first time that I read that business has to be part of the devops shift [Chap 3, page 46] or why, in the transitionnal culture in IT Dev and Ops have opposed targets [Chap. 4, page 74] and that you just needs to change them (with pros and cons).

In fact true technical chapters are not that technicals and outernumbered (3/9 chapters) by those about organization, social layer, and more.

The author underlines that the change will be global. Even if you are the One caring to make the change happesn, you don’t know everything and you have to detect issue you never heard of and how to gain support. It’s a book not only centralized on dev nor ops; it’s also on the big heads of the enterprise.

I’m going to use this book as a communication tool in my enterprise :)