DevOps: Why, What, and How – a FREE MOOC from EMC Education Services

Over the last several years, the phenomenon known as DevOps has been a topic with interest ranging from tepid to hot.  It has a lot of different definitions, has aggregated or spawned a lot of tools, has set a lot of expectations, and has evolved its own career opportunities and job descriptions.  DevOps has generated huge amounts of buzz.  And when working in a training organization for a tech company, you cannot avoid seeing a gradual creep from the fringes into the mainstream, when a “concept” or “practice” goes beyond full on compliant buzzword.  “What is DevOps”,  “Do we have a job description”, “Do we have a course”, “Do we have a task list” – are all questions that I have received from our Sales team.

My interest in the DevOps culture started after reading Gene Kim’s (and others) “The Phoenix Project”, recommended by former EMC tech pioneer (and long-time thought leader and collaborator) Denis Guyadeen – who told me in 2012 that “DevOps was mainstream”. Denis was always way ahead of the curve.

I have been leading a team focused on Development and Operations for years. The business of education has its own challenges – designing an offering based on business problems or needs, developing IP to hopefully help our customers with that business problem or requirement, and operationalizing that offering for mass consumption. When creating training for a diverse audience of thousands of consumers, that needs to be tracked, managed, published to a learning management system, added to learning paths, maintained, updated, consolidated, and retired – it is not about just about Content DEVelopment; it is a whole lotta OPerationS.  Plus, when you start making sophisticated offerings leveraging learning platforms for MOOCs, you need to tighten up your development and operations functions to minimize time to market challenges.

These challenges are not unlike IT, or any other domain, that goes through a design, develop, and mainstream cycle for their products.  So can we apply the culture of DevOps to our (to any) business? Though the tools and processes may change, the cultural spirit is still intact – how to more tightly integrate or couple the Develop and Operations functions, with a focus on continuous improvement and continuous evolution.  In fact, our Education Services organization recently went through an entire business model evolution to better align all of our functional teams to achieve greater efficiency and look for economies within key functions. So I think yes, we can all benefit by thinking about our respective businesses more abstractly and apply key DevOps principles.

But I digress.  Over the last several months, my team has been focused on a MOOC learning offering that explains — wait for it … DevOps – simply titled DevOps – What, Why and How.  The spirit of the offering is to explain in a very simple way the culture and tools used by the Development and Operations teams and how that can help IT in order to benefit the customer.  This offering is entry level, no experience or relative background required, and is for anyone interested in learning what all “this DevOps stuff” is about.  Please join us starting on March 29 for a 5 week class – details in the attached link.   It is an introduction to the principles and practices of the cultural evolution of the discipline that is helping IT orgs make it happen.  But even if you are not in IT, think about your own business because you might just be able to use some of these principles to help you in whatever your focus.  It is really about people working together collaboratively, using tools and methods to continuously improve, and providing value to your customer.

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