DBAs are you good at your job?

Book review of: DevOps for the Modern Enterprise by Mirco Hering that was published in April 2018. The book is 288 pages, 12 chapters, 30 figures, and 5 tables chocked full of information to get your DevOps juices flowing. Hering is the Managing Director at Accenture and leads the Agile & DevOps practice.

In the book, Hering discusses the challenges organizations face as they transform into modern IT departments. However, if you have an established DevOps organization, you will learn some new techniques or areas for further improvement in your DevOps processes.

There are 3 parts of the book according to Hering.

• Creating the right ecosystem (Chapters 1-4)
• People and Organizational Dimension (Chapters 5-8)
• Technology and Architecture Aspects (Chapters 9-12)

Various points made by Hering throughout in the book.

• Everything in this book is supported by Agile, DevOPs and Lean principles.
• Each journey of transformation is contextual and there is never one recipe for success.
• Small batch sizes allow us to invest smaller amounts to validate a business idea and make fewer large bets.
• Don’t be discouraged if things don’t change overnight.
• Baseline metrics have proven to be successful in guiding transformations (Table 1.1).
• Determine a realistic review frequency to see whether or not your empowered ecosystem is helping you improve the application.
• Automation and process changes capture quality issues at the point of origin and enable faster, more frequent and less costly releases (Fig. 7.1).
• Measuring quality is not easy.
• Move from testing to quality engineering.
• Delivery models: continuous, cloud enabled, container enabled and serverless enabled like Amazon lambda.
• Organizations can never provide all the training you need.

There is a great quote at the start of Chapter 9 by Vince Lombardi: ‘Gentlemen, we are going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because nothing is perfect. But we are going to relentlessly chase it, because in the process we will catch excellence. I am not remotely interested in just being good.’.

DBAs don’t be interested in just being good at your job. Right?

Hering’s book was awarded the DevOps book of the year 2018. This book is a must read!