DevOps Is Culture, Not Tools

DevOps is a culture of shared responsibility between development and operations teams. Tools (CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, monitoring) enable DevOps, but the culture — collaboration, automation, continuous improvement — is what makes it work. At Nexis Limited, our engineering teams own their services from code to production, embodying the "you build it, you run it" principle.

CI/CD Pipeline Design

Continuous Integration

Every code change triggers an automated pipeline that:

  • Compiles the code and checks for type errors.
  • Runs linters and formatters to enforce code style.
  • Executes unit tests and integration tests.
  • Scans for security vulnerabilities in dependencies.
  • Builds container images and pushes to a registry.

The entire CI pipeline should complete in under 10 minutes. Slow pipelines reduce developer productivity and encourage batch commits.

Continuous Deployment

After CI passes on the main branch, automatic deployment to staging begins. After staging validation (automated smoke tests, manual checks), production deployment follows. Use rolling updates, blue-green deployments, or canary deployments to minimize risk.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Service Level Objectives (SLOs)

SLOs define the target reliability for a service — "99.9% of requests complete in under 500ms" or "99.95% uptime per month." SLOs are the contract between the service team and its users. They are more useful than vague goals like "make it fast" because they are measurable and specific.

Error Budgets

The error budget is the difference between perfection and your SLO. With a 99.9% uptime SLO, you have 43 minutes of allowed downtime per month. When the error budget is healthy, teams can ship features faster and take more risks. When the error budget is depleted, priority shifts to reliability improvements.

On-Call and Incident Management

  • Rotate on-call responsibility among team members — no one should be on-call permanently.
  • Use alerting that pages on-call engineers only for actionable issues (see monitoring section).
  • Have a clear incident response process: acknowledge, diagnose, mitigate, communicate, resolve.
  • Conduct blameless postmortems after incidents — focus on systemic improvements, not individual blame.

Infrastructure Automation

  • Define all infrastructure in code (Terraform, Pulumi, CDK).
  • Automate environment creation — developers should be able to spin up a complete environment with a single command.
  • Automate database migrations as part of the deployment pipeline.
  • Automate certificate management, DNS updates, and secret rotation.

Developer Experience

DevOps should improve developer experience, not add burden:

  • One-command local development setup (Docker Compose, devcontainers).
  • Fast CI pipelines that provide feedback quickly.
  • Self-service infrastructure provisioning without tickets.
  • Clear documentation for deployment, debugging, and incident response.

Conclusion

DevOps and SRE practices create a virtuous cycle: automation reduces operational toil, monitoring provides visibility, SLOs focus improvement efforts, and error budgets balance velocity with reliability. Start with CI/CD and monitoring, then adopt SRE practices as your services mature.

Building your DevOps practice? Our team implements CI/CD, monitoring, and infrastructure automation.