Over this last week, there’s been a lot of talk around freedom of thought and expression. This actually sparked an interesting (and very much less political) conversation within our team around DevOps standards and engineers’ freedom.
Freedom vs. Standards
The tension between freedom and standards in DevOps is a widely debated topic. I spent quite some time trying to formulate a framework for how engineering leaders can think about this issue when designing processes for their teams and wrote this article.
I’ve gathered my thoughts about a concept I call “the evil triangle of engineering processes”. It means that in DevOps reality you somewhat need to choose two of the three: velocity, maintainability, and freedom. If you let everyone spin up any infrastructure, write config scripts however they want, and don’t align on anything, you will not get anywhere. If you restrict everything, however, you will lose creativity. In the end, it comes down to how we interpret the sentence “you build it, you run it”.
Now, I invite you to do the following:
- Read the article I wrote with several thought leaders from the DevOps world
- Join our community discussion webinar on February 2nd on the topic starring Füsun Wehrmann (Wayfair) and Yair Etziony (Polar Squad).
I’d very much like to see you there!
Freedom and automation
Other than that, I’m excited to announce that we’re shipping webhooks. Webhooks are a great way for teams to automate workflows between tools and streamline their engineering workflows. Check out our announcement here.
We’re also covering this feature in a webinar that Christoph and I are holding on Jan 21st: “Automating delivery workflows using an Internal Developer Platform”.
Freedom and standards
A great way to combine the two is standard operating procedures (also covered in the article mentioned above). The way a team leverages these is also reflected in how it manages application configurations. Find out more in our hands-on webinar on Jan 19th, hosted by Chris Stephenson which deep dives into “Managing Kubernetes App Configurations in growing teams”.
Chris Stephenson becoming our CTO
And finally, it’s with great pleasure that I’m announcing Chris Stephenson as Humanitec’s new CTO. Chris joined us 1.5 years ago after building platform teams at companies such as Google. He has shaped our product and teams significantly and we’re delighted to make him part of our C-level management team as well as Co-Founder. I am looking forward to continuing serving alongside you, Chris!
In any case: stay free! Thank you for being here with us.
Kaspar
