DevOps community: motivation, pitfalls, and prospects.

Why did you take up leading the DevOps community?

To be honest, I’m not a typical engineer. I get frustrated when constantly working on technical tasks while people inspire me a lot. I have 15 years of leading a media production team behind me. So, this kind of work is a sort of habit for me. Communicating with the guys, discussing ideas, solving problems, and collaborating with other communities are the things that really drive me. Moreover, at Exadel, there are countless opportunities to implement my ideas. I don’t see any internal obstacles here.

Do you face any pitfalls on your way?

Not without them. A major stumbling block is that the community members are scattered worldwide. I used to go to the office and gather all my colleagues for a DevOps coffee and a face-to-face chat. Now those times are truly gone. We lack face-to-face communication, and that is a challenge. We are still building an online culture. Now I am looking for platforms and services to make our mutual work and communication more engaging and efficient. And we still hope to organize offline events in the offices.

What can the DevOps community be proud of?

I “inherited” a DevOps community built by Raman Khvashcheuski, DevOps Department Manager. The processes were well-established, so I had a good enough track to move on.  I need to say that DevOps engineers are special people who are very sociable, outgoing, and able to think outside the box. Quite often they come into the profession from different areas: business, linguistics, architecture, and even art. So, I see our main resource in people. There are about 90 participants in the community which not only include DevOps engineers but also people from other departments. It is so cool that the company supports many different initiatives. We can promote our ideas and be heard.

What are you working on now?

We are facing the necessity to rebuild the processes created for offline life. Now we are working on a total restructuring of our meetups. We have two major goals now: to knit together people within the community and to work on our technical expertise. To reach the first goal we have organized a so-called “Real-life DevOps BackStage”. These are biweekly informal meetings where we discuss significant social issues or just chat. The second goal is realized through DevOps Certification Club, where we train our colleagues to get Amazon Certification. We are about to launch a new course on certification preparation support. Our overacting objective is to spread this initiative to a whole-company level. We want all the departments and communities to collaborate. It would be a huge benefit for the company to create centralized training for similar exams and certifications.  Another activity we promote is holding technical meetups, called DevOps CLI (continuous learning institute). Perhaps you noticed the play on words because CLI also stands for a command-line interface, a term well-known to any DevOps Engineer. We look for engaging technical topics and share knowledge among ourselves.”

What about the community plans?

First of all, we plan to switch all our meetups to English and then share them externally. We want to invite interesting speakers and collaborate with other communities, or even companies. DevOps is not just a profession, it's a methodology. So, we’d like to promote the idea of “DevOps everywhere” and hope to conquer an external audience. We are preparing to launch Exadel’s DevOps Community Instagram, so now we are busy with the structure and content. Its main objective is to put the spotlight on our colleagues’ lives and update them on news, announcements, and so on.