Devops Project Quote by Gene Kim
““Greenfield DevOps projects are often pilots to demonstrate feasibility of public or private clouds, piloting deployment automation, and similar tools. An example of a greenfield DevOps project is the Hosted LabVIEW product in 2009 at National Instruments, a thirty-year-old organization with five thousand employees and $1 billion in annual revenue. To bring this product to market quickly, a new team was created and allowed to operate outside of the existing IT processes and explore the use of public clouds. The initial team included an applications architect, a systems architect, two developers, a system automation developer, an operations lead, and two offshore operations staff. By using DevOps practices, they were able to deliver Hosted LabVIEW to market in half the time of their normal product introductions.””
About This Quote
Source Article: The Phoenix Project case study, Gene Kim, 2018
Greenfield DevOps teams can bypass legacy constraints to accelerate delivery using modern cloud and automation tools.
In simple terms: New teams can move faster by operating outside old processes.
Key Takeaway
Create a separate, empowered team for rapid innovation.
Themes
innovation
speed
cloud
automation
team autonomy
Mood
optimistic
strategic
Type
case study
practical
When to use this quote
- product launch
- cloud migration
- process redesign
Key Concepts
DevOps
greenfield projects
pilot programs
Questions to Reflect On
- How can you balance speed with future integration?
- What risks arise from operating outside existing governance?
A Different Perspective
Legacy systems can resist change, causing integration challenges later.
![“Bill Baker, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, quipped that we used to treat servers like pets: “You name them and when they get sick, you nurse them back to health. [Now] servers are [treated] like cattle. You number them and when they get sick, you shoot them.” quote by Gene Kim](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/e7b/gene-kim-2268_health_bill-baker-a-distinguished-engineer-at-m_187582.jpg)
