Originally published on the 2018 DZone Guide to DevOps - Culture and Process, Volume V.

Rather than being a skill, a position you can hire in your IT department, or a specific tool you can purchase, DevOps is a culture-shifting paradigm. The goals are to add increased value for the customer and to enable organizations to react faster to change in the business.

These nine principles help you develop a DevOps mindset in your organization:

  1. Before you start developing, define and validate the expected impact on IT.
  2. Automate infrastructure provisioning to boost your development and testing speed.
  3. Mimic production as closely as possible in all non-production environments.
  4. Anticipate failure by testing scenarios on top of a self-healing infrastructure.
  5. Continuously integrate your code during app development.
  6. Register your configurations in a centralized, shared repository and track every application change.
  7. Orchestrate deployment with automation that defines all steps of the process for each application.
  8. Measure app health and performance and the impact of your apps on your business and customers once they reach production.
  9. Make sure all collected feedback is shared with all stakeholders.

Ultimately, DevOps is all about bridging the gap between development and operations. Low-code development platforms provide a way to cross that chasm with capabilities that enable these nine principles.

Examples include a unified application lifecycle management console, embedded version control and build server with continuous integration, built-in monitoring and analytics, high-availability configuration, and centralized configuration management.

Combining the speed of low-code visual development with the agility of DevOps can greatly accelerate digital transformation.