DevOps: The CAMS Model
In this article, we will ignore the Sec in DevSecOps and focus on DevOps.
Before DevOps many organizations were running in complete isolation, there was no collaboration and each engineering team was only responsible was for their own task. In environments that operate siloed cultural work practices people didn't want to take responsibility for others teams work and blame games between teams is common.
So in this article, I will discuss the CAMS model, which is a framework created by Damon Edwards and John Willis to solve the above problem
CAMS stands for Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing. Because of these principles and the core principle of CAMS models are as follows:
C = Culture
A = Automation
M = Measurement
S = Sharing
Culture
According to the definition, [1] the word culture is defined as a group of people practice the same routines in terms of religion, food and even how they live. In easy word culture mean how individuals live their life with some standards and norms.
Similarly in any organization Developer and operation practices their own cultures like developer speaking and writes many language such as java, c# , Python etc. and their objectives and deliverables are very innovative , experimental and futuristic. On the other hand, operations team think about stability and reliable environments for the application to run and most importantly their works and deliverable are hidden , which mean they always work behind the stage and most of the time there work goes unseen and unappreciated.
Because of this silos both dev and ops work in their own environment and comfort zone , so if organization and top management promotes the culture of openness , collaboration , communication and willingness than this silos will break and both development and operations will work and follow the "OCCW" the benefit of this culture will be dev and ops become " DEVOPS ".
Automation
Automate works like any other principle of CAMS like culture as discussed above. In today world stage where technology and innovation change very often and lunching the product as early as possible is become very crucial for business.
Because of the speed and high rate in change, automation comes very handy. Automation save time and improve efficiency like CI/CD continues integration and continues delivery or infrastructure as code.
CI/CD pipeline automate overall delivery of the product. Due to CAMS delivery is agile and team break product into small deliverable and automatic.
Measurement
Measurement is very important because when we are promoting the CAMS model in our organization then how we can measure the improvement. So there are many ways we can measure the overall devOps performance and one the way is KPI (Key performance indicator). In measurement we can ask as much questions for example
- How many deadlock occur today?
- How many pushes and pulls to the repo’s?
- How to measure the client satisfaction?
- What was the collaboration scale today?
Above are the few questions from many of them, we can ask form our self, how we can improve or how can we be more collaborative to make better devOps team and contribute towards common goals.
Sharing
“Sharing is caring“sharing is the last principle of the CAMS model and the most important one. Why it is important?
To understand sharing there are three main pillar of sharing.
- Openness
- Transparent
- Willingness
Openness
First look into the openness, when everyone in the team is open to other team member , this will help them to came close and because of this they will more willing to work together and enjoy.
Transparent
Transparency help every team member to see the overall progress and even progress of other teams as well. Transparency is what allows everyone to work towards a common goal. So that’s why we did what we did.
Willingness
The DevOps process, similar to Agile and Scrum, emphasizes transparency and openness. Knowledge transfer helps to tighten feedback and avoid deadlocks and allows the organization to continuously improve and deliver. This collective intelligence makes the team more efficient.
Conclusion
Given this model, we have become more aware that the pure automation part of the build and delivery chain is only a small part of DevOps. DevOps is not just a tool, but more than that. It is a culture, a state of mind, using the same concepts as Agility, using Lean principles. In other words, DevOps relies heavily on Lean.
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