The role of DevOps in building startups — Rob Hirschfeld // RackN

Quotes

• "When you think of DevOps as the historical way for enterprises to bridge developers and operations and take system thinking into the mix, Yes, you could see it as an enterprise thing. If you look at it as a systems-thinking approach to building infrastructure and creating pipelines and automation, then no, startups more desperately than any other company need to have a DevOps approach." - Rob Hirschfeld

• "DevOps is built on the principles of Deming, just-in-time manufacturing, and things like that. And so those concepts are the lifeblood of startups." - Rob Hirschfeld

• "When I hear DevOps, it's tied into how we run infrastructure. How are we operating the infrastructure? How do we create automation? When you're automating infrastructure. You're plugging things together, and people don't get involved in all those steps, right? If you're building great automation, then this is where DevOps is key. You're starting with the people producing code or security. Write down your product requirements. All of those things flow into the system. And then there's an automated process that produces and publishes your code at the end of it. You don't want people to be involved in that day-to-day flow; the less they're involved, the faster that pipeline goes and the better it gets." - Rob Hirschfeld

• "When you're trying to figure out what your core base product is, you can run into the trap of spending too much time building the perfect build system. The challenge for any startup is to not confuse building their technology stack with getting product viability fit." - Rob Hirschfeld

• "When you're building something that needs to run people's production data centers or people start depending on your product, they don't want it to be an MVP; they want that DevOps discipline of building CI and CD systems, testing, security checks, and all those pieces. When you start selling a product to somebody, you want the confidence that those things and those checks are there." - Rob Hirschfeld

• "As a minimum, I think that you should have a gated review git process. That build process should build and check to be able to run your build scripts and build automation on every commit. That should be able to run as a minimum lint. Some degree of system checks, some degree of capability checks." - Rob Hirschfeld