Essential Guide

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Editor's note

DevOps means something different to every organization in terms of culture, best practices and tool pipelines. And that's a good thing.

"Now, we have a lot of enterprises [to provide DevOps examples]. We don't only want to rely on what works for the unicorns," said Patrick Debois, co-author of The DevOps Handbook, a guidebook for DevOps implementation. The balancing act for DevOps best practices, tool recommendations and other advice is to make it broad enough for diverse IT teams to apply it successfully, not just companies with deep Agile and IT technical expertise paired with vast resources and flexible roadmaps. According to The DevOps Handbook co-author Gene Kim, enterprise IT shops are more like horses than the unique early DevOps adopter unicorns.

For teams unsure of where to start -- or those that have plateaued without a clear path to more improvements -- these before and after DevOps examples from real IT organizations yield insights into processes used, metrics for success and common mistakes and delays. 

1Creating a CI/CD and agile infrastructure

While DevOps examples vary from company to company, there are some key tenets and practices that all organizations use as a common basis for implementation. Continuous delivery, configuration management and automation are the go-to choices, while immutable infrastructure and NoOps push the possibilities for organizations that are ready for radical infrastructure change.