Independence: Self-Service Deployment

If there’s anything that bugs a developer, especially one in an agile team, it’s waiting for a DevOps engineer to provision the infra and set up the environment. Having to wait for this is not just a hit on productivity, but also overall motivation and effectiveness. Let’s say a developer is debugging something and wants to test in a different environment. If the DevOps team has an SLA of two days to enable that, they’re unlikely to persist. They might try to debug within the resources available to them. This can be constraining.

Developers want to quickly and independently deploy to any k8s cluster on any cloud for dev, test, or delivery purposes, without back-and-forth with the delivery team.

Speed: Idea to Code to Outcome

DevOps tends to conjure up an image of the development and operations halves of the cycle as not just equal, but also symmetrical — remember the infinity visual of the DevOps cycle? The reality is a little more complex. Application teams want as little time and energy spent on deployment and operations as possible. They want to quickly propagate app changes and focus on understanding customer feedback, planning feature improvements, writing better code and optimising application performance. Time spent by a developer learning the peculiarities of Kubernetes is time snatched away from focusing on customer-centric application development.

As a result, developers want to speed up the journey from idea, to code, to outcome. They want to declare their end-game and have the process be taken care of.