DevOps core values: CAMS

- The CAMS model, created by DevOps pioneers, John Willis and Damon Edwards. It stands for Culture, Automation, Measurement and Sharing. You know, CAMS's become the model set of values used by many DevOps practitioners. Patrick Debois, he's often referred to as the godfather of DevOps since he coined the term. But he likes to say that DevOps is a human problem. Well, DevOps is often thought of as a technology problem, in reality, it's a cultural and business problem. Well, what is culture? Culture is a lot more than ping pong tables in the office or free food in the company cafeteria. Culture is driven by behavior. Culture exists among people with a mutual understanding of each other and where they're coming from. Early on in IT organizations, we split teams into two majors groups. Development, they were charged with creating features. And operations they were charged with maintaining stability. Walls formed around these silos due to their different goals. Now, today, after this pattern has had a long time to metastasize, these groups don't speak the same language and they don't have mutual understanding. You know, changing these underlying behaviors and assumptions is how you can drive change in your company's culture. All right, this brings us to the A in CAMS. That's Automation. The first thing people usually think about when they think of DevOps it's Automation. In the early days of DevOps, some people equated the term just to anybody who's using Chef or Puppet or CFEngine. But part of the point of CAMS is to bring back balance into how we think about it. DevOps is not just about automated tooling, people and process. They got to come first. You know, Damon Edwards expressed this as people over process over tools. Now, all that said, Automation is a critical part of our DevOps journey. Once you begin to understand your culture, you can create a fabric of automation that allows you to control your systems and your applications. Automation is that accelerator that's going to get you all the other benefits of DevOps. So you really want to make sure you prioritize automation as your primary approach to the problem. All right, this brings us to the M in CAMS. That stands for Measurement. One of the keys to rational approach to our systems is the ability for us to measure them. All right, there's two major pitfalls in metrics. First, sometimes we choose the wrong metrics to watch. And second, sometimes we fail to incentivize them properly. Because of this DevOps strongly advises you to measure key metrics across the organization. Look for things like MTTR, the Mean Time to Recovery or cycle time, look for costs, revenue, even something like employee satisfaction. All of these are part of generating a holistic insight across your system. These metrics help engage the team and the overall goal. It's common to see them shared internally or even exposed externally to customers. Oh, you know, speaking of sharing that brings us to the S in CAMS. Sharing ideas and problems is the heart of collaboration. And it's also really the heart of DevOps. And DevOps expect to see a high premium placed on openness and transparency. This drives Kaizen, which is a Japanese word That means discreet continuous improvement. Now we're going to talk more about this in our video on Lean, but sharing is the feedback loop that helps continuous improve. All right, CAMS, that's Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing. They're the four fundamental and mutually reinforcing values to bring to a DevOps implementation. They're the why behind many of the more specific techniques that we're going to cover later in this course. You really want to take these values to heart because the rest of your DevOps journey is going to be about trying to realize them in your organization.