Gene Kim

“failure results in reflection and genuine inquiry.”

— Gene Kim

“Gatekeeper, the Facebook feature toggling service.”

— Gene Kim

“We have even managed to turn into a Twitter trending topic. All”

— Gene Kim

“repetition creates habits, and habits are what enable mastery.”

— Gene Kim

“habits are what enable mastery.”

— Gene Kim

“When deciding whether a message should be ERROR or WARN, imagine being woken up at 4 a.m. Low printer toner is not…

— Gene Kim

“Features are always a gamble. If you’re lucky, ten percent will get the desired benefits.”

— Gene Kim

To tell the truth is an act of love. To withhold the truth is an act of hate. Or worse, apathy.

— Gene Kim

“Ensure releases can always be performed during normal business hours with zero downtime.”

— Gene Kim

The status quo (of development) pre-ordains failure from the very beginning.

— Gene Kim

“we need to design our systems so that they are continually creating telemetry, widely”

— Gene Kim

“our most fragile artifacts support either our most important revenue-generating systems or our most critical projects. In”

— Gene Kim

“It is virtually impossible to make any business decision that doesn’t result in at least one IT change.”

— Gene Kim

“common practice of using rumor and hearsay, which can lead to the unfortunate metric of mean time until declared innocent—how quickly can…

— Gene Kim

“We’re like the Bates Motel of changes,” I say in disbelief. “Changes go in but never come out. Within a month, we’ll…

— Gene Kim

“When everyone is conditioned to believe that no isn’t an acceptable answer, we all just became compliant order takers, blindly marching down…

— Gene Kim

“He sounded just like that dude from Pulp Fiction. He even quoted the line about the day of reckoning and striking people…

— Gene Kim

“One of the most important parts of any improvement initiative is to define a measurable goal with a clearly defined deadline, between…

— Gene Kim

“telemetry is what enables us to assemble our best understanding of reality and detect when our understanding of reality is incorrect.”

— Gene Kim

“developers should be able to understand and update the code of a service without knowing anything about the internals of its peer…

— Gene Kim

“Work is not done when Development completes the implementation of a feature—rather, it is only done when our application is running successfully…

— Gene Kim

“We cannot achieve deployments on demand if every code deployment requires two weeks to set up our test environments and data sets,…

— Gene Kim

“If you can’t out-experiment and beat your competitors in time to market and agility, you are sunk. Features are always a gamble.…

— Gene Kim

“Many psychologists assert that creating systems that cause feelings of powerlessness is one of the most damaging things we can do to…

— Gene Kim

“In order to create fast and reliable flow from Dev to Ops, we must ensure that we always use production-like environments at…

— Gene Kim

“Integration problems result in a significant amount of rework to get back into a deployable state, including conflicting changes that must be…

— Gene Kim

“We cannot achieve deployments on-demand if we always have to wait weeks or months for production or test environments. The countermeasure is…

— Gene Kim

“Brent. Brent, Brent, Brent! Can’t we do anything without him? Look at us! We’re trying to have a management discussion about commitments…

— Gene Kim

“Bill Baker, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, quipped that we used to treat servers like pets: “You name them and when they…

— Gene Kim

“TRANSFORM LOCAL DISCOVERIES INTO GLOBAL IMPROVEMENTS When new learnings are discovered locally, there must also be some mechanism to enable the rest…

— Gene Kim

“After a couple of tries, I end up with a graph that looks like this: I tell them what Erik told me…

— Gene Kim

“Contrast this to the more traditional model where Development and Test teams are assigned to a “project” and then reassigned to another…

— Gene Kim

“When these accidents affect our customers, we seek to understand why it happened. The root cause is often deemed to be human…

— Gene Kim

“We will actively manage this technical debt by ensuring that we invest at least 20% of all Development and Operations cycles on…

— Gene Kim

“Shaking his head, he continues, “It’s harder than ever to convince the business to do the right thing. They’re like kids in…

— Gene Kim

“Myth—DevOps Means Eliminating IT Operations, or “NoOps”: Many misinterpret DevOps as the complete elimination of the IT Operations function. However, this is…

— Gene Kim

“Greenfield DevOps projects are often pilots to demonstrate feasibility of public or private clouds, piloting deployment automation, and similar tools. An example…

— Gene Kim

“Small batch sizes result in less WIP, faster lead times, faster detection of errors, and less rework.”

— Gene Kim

“There are newborn babies dropped off at church doorsteps with more operating instructions than what they’re giving us.”

— Gene Kim

“creating application and infrastructure telemetry to be one of the highest return investments we’ve made. In”

— Gene Kim