What makes you a successful DevOps engineer?
Beside the R&D day-to-day problems and the development processes maintenance, one of the best-practices in the DevOps engineer work is to wear the entrepreneur’s hat and work like a “Startupper” inside the R&D department.
Many times, a customer (developer) arrives with a problem that she is experiencing or asks for additional features in the product developed by the DevOps engineer.
Other times, a developer comes with a problem for the DevOps engineer who needs to provide a solution that suits the customer. Let’s take a brief about the 4 main goals that DevOps engineer needs to achieve as a Startupper inside the R&D department.
#1 Goal — Problem Validation:
- What does the developer need?
- What is she missing?
- Are there other developers experiencing this problem? (If so, then the DevOps engineer should provide a generic solution that is suitable for all developers and not the specific developer who complained. If there are no other developers with the problem, they probably surpassed it or solved it in some way, so building a solution may be irrelevant).
Bottom line: in the first step it is necessary to make sure that the problem exists, and the market is relevant.
#2 Goal — Market Research
Are there solutions on the market that can help a developer solve the problem she is experiencing? If there are preexisting solutions, we will consider using them according to the organization’s preferences (costs, deployment, maintenance, etc.).
Bottom line: it is necessary to know what the external solutions are.
#3 Goal —The Solution
Is the solution fit to my vision? (e.g. — if my vision is to make my team a “DevOps as a service”, I will not provide a solution that will be managed and maintained by the DevOps engineers team in the future. The solution should also lead me to my vision and not just to solving the key problem of the developers).
If we have not found external solutions that are indeed suitable for the organization in all aspects, the DevOps engineer will characterize a solution (Using open-source projects is very popular, but many times the solutions are characterized and developed within the organization tools. For example Jenkins Pipeline, Ansible playbooks, etc.)
Bottom line: We want to characterize a solution that will fit our vision and will be loved by the developers (Is the solution convenient for them? Does it really solve the problem they are describing? Does it require any effort or changes in the way it works? etc.)
#4 Goal — Release & Analyze
After the DevOps engineers have completed the development of the solution, they publish it to the developers along with documentation, explanations, and close assistance during the implementation of the solution on the customer’s side (the developer).
After the implementation of the solution, the DevOps engineers will receive feedback (positive / negative) that will help improve the solution and help adapt it to the needs of the developers.
Bottom line: we launch a first version of the solution to help us get to “Product Market Fit”.
As Startuppers, when DevOps engineers build a solution, they not only want to solve the key problem, but also to lead the organization to their vision.
DevOps engineers vision examples:
- Fully automated development processes
- Completely Independent Developers (DevOps as a Service)
- From DevOps processes to DevSecOps processes
- Infrastructure fully managed by IaC tools
I would love to hear your opinion about this! Do you work as a Startupper in your organization?
