Is the SAFe DevOps Certification For Me? - DevOps - Big Picture
To start, if you are thinking about signing up for this course, don’t let the SAFe orientation give you pause. Naturally, the skills and knowledge will be welcome in any SAFe shop out there, but DevOps cuts across more than just development. Regardless of what style of agile your development teams are practicing, the skills and information presented during these two days will be valuable. I guess the best way to say it is that being in a SAFe shop isn’t a requirement for the usefulness of this course, but it you are in a SAFe shop, then you should think strongly about taking this class.
And the content? Well, before we dive into the specifics, let’s talk bigger picture things. Most DevOps learning occurs today at one of two extremes; either the content is a technical nuts-and-bolts thing that talks very low-level implementation details, or its a higher-level-abstract thing that talks about how to enable DevOps organizationally, while leaving the details to the DevOps team who will implement that transition.
SAFe’s DevOps course lands firmly in the second half of that spectrum. It won’t directly walk you through how to setup any server stacks or the latest cloud-based products, but it does talk about how to position your organization to insist that those things happen. I don’t consider this a bad thing, after all, how many people take Scrum Master courses in order to learn to code? Hopefully not many.
Does this mean that the SDP is only for management? Not even a little bit. Remember back in the days when very few people knew what a Scrum Master was? When you were one and you showed up in a Dev team, your first job was training. You had to show everyone how to do basic Scrum. For Scrum practitioners, that isn’t the situation so much anymore, but it still is for DevOps. In many organizations, the first person to hit the floor with a DevOps cert will likely become the go-to person whenever questions about DevOps crop up. Conversely, the person most people go to for DevOps answers, might be a good candidate for this cert! If you are living either of those situations, then this course is very much in your ballpark.
One more point before we dive into the content. If you haven’t yet read the excellent DevOps Handbook, by Gene Kim and others (Gene also was the author of the Phoenix Project) then you owe it to yourself to do so. The book and the SDP course both track along very similar lines. In my study of both pieces of knowledge, I didn’t find any locations where one contradicted the other in any significant way.
