To Up-Skill People In DevOps, Beware
In Plato’s allegory of the cave, prisoners see and hear an abstract version of reality, without experiencing it themselves, and so they do not understand reality at all.
Most DevOps training is awful. I know, because I have taught a number of the available courses, and audited others.
I have been shocked.
The quality is so low that people are actually better off not taking any course at all, but instead reading what they can and talking to colleagues in the profession.
Widely Available DevOps Training
DevOps training generally exists of two types:
Concepts only, intended for non-programmers.
Hands-on, intended for programmers.
One problem is the sharp divide: type one—training for non-programmers—is insufficient. It consists of abstract descriptions of high level concepts, unsupported by tangible examples. People taking such a course do not experience anything: it is like learning calculus by reading about it and never doing any of it: almost nothing will stick.
In the movie What About Bob? the phobia-ridden character Bob, played by Bill Murray, believes that having been on a sailboat safely tied to the mast has given him the experience of sailing.
Type 2 is just as bad in the opposite way: the courses I have seen describe very abstract concepts and then dive into what I call a “tour of tools”. In a tour of tools, the student is walked through a trivial example of using some tool, such as creating a simple Jenkins job. But little connection is made to the abstract concepts that were described earlier. Students usually have a project to do, but it is trivial, and done alone, whereas real DevOps issues arise when there is a team—in fact many teams. You can’t do DevOps alone.
Even worse, some of the most popular and most widely sold DevOps training courses seem to have been put together by a grad student who assembled some DevOps maxims off of the Internet, combined those with tool brochureware, and then pulled tool examples from the Internet as well, mashing them together like a misshapen quilt. I do not exaggerate. The result is devoid of any DevOps knowledge, but is sold as a DevOps certification.
It is a case of content being misrepresented and aggressively sold, and people choosing based on popularity and not having a way to do a proper assessment of what they are getting. The claim might be made that the course was created by a university, but that tells you little. In fact, universities do not generally know much about DevOps: DevOps comes from industry—not from academia.
What People Really Need
Our DevOps training was created by individuals who have worked in industry doing real DevOps: people who have been on DevOps teams and who have supported DevOps at all levels, from the CIO level down through the team level. We know the real issues that arise, and most DevOps issues are not about the team: they are about the product and the ecosystem of many teams.
DevOps father Gene Kim tells us this. In his famous DevOps “Three Ways” he wrote,
The First Way emphasizes the performance of the entire system…The focus is on all business value streams that are enabled by IT…
People who misunderstand DevOps over-emphasize the team, but we have collected data that clearly shows that 80% of the production incidents that occur in complex microservice-intensive product environments are integration-related: issues that not only span teams, but span products.
If you train them they might leave, but if you don’t train them, they might stay!
There are ways to solve this; but what works for Google will likely not work for you. When a programmer at Google commits a code change, Google’s home-built tooling automatically deploys for testing all the other products that are potentially affected by the change, and runs all of their integration tests—hundreds of thousands of them. Can you afford to do that? Probably not. But there are other approaches that work almost as well and are very cost effective.
These issues, and many more like them, are the heart of DevOps, but none of that is covered in courses of type one or two from above. Our course is the only one that we know of that covers real multi-team DevOps issues, which are the real issues. That’s why we call it “Multi-Team DevOps,” because real DevOps is about the issues that lots of teams working on a set of products encounter.
If you want to quickly upskill people in DevOps, our course is the only one we know of that will do the job.
