The Phoenix Project

Start Your DevOps Journey

The Phoenix Project tells the story of a company in constant firefighting—losing money, with unhappy customers and employees. It reveals how they solved it and transformed from:

  • Constant firefighting
  • Interruptions
  • No ability to do any work
  • Poor customer outcomes
  • 1 deployment per year (that resulted in multiple disasters)

To:

  • to 10 deployments per day
  • LESS work from employees
  • Happy customers
  • More money coming in

Yes, 10 deployments per day with fewer interruptions and more positive outcomes. It was my first explicit introduction to the 3 Ways of DevOps:

  1. Flow
  2. Feedback
  3. Continuous Learning and Experimentation

1. Flow

  • Continuous integration (frequent check-ins, automated builds and tests)
  • Test-Driven Development (TDD)
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Ensure smooth and efficient movement of work from development through to operations, creating value for end-users by minimizing bottlenecks and interruptions.

2. Feedback

  • Monitoring, logging, and alerts for normal operation and deployments
  • ChatOps!

Establish rapid and continuous feedback loops at every stage to quickly identify and address issues.

3. Continuous Learning and Experimentation

  • Blameless postmortems
  • Value Stream Mapping (VSM)
  • Experimentation and learning
  • Andon cord

Cultivate a culture that encourages ongoing learning, innovation, and improvement through safe experimentation.

If you’re a DevOps engineer, that doesn’t just mean knowing Python, Terraform, and Kubernetes. These tools are opinionated implementations of the 3 Ways.

Check out The Phoenix Project here