In order for any sort of process, framework or methodology to succeed in the IT world, it absolutely must involve a large number of acronyms. And devops is no different. In the devops world we like to say that there are five underlying principles of devops, and they’re represented by the acronym CALMS. As with any good IT acronym, you start with the acronym itself and then work backwards from there. The main reason why the CALMS word was chosen for the devops world was because of the unlimited marketing oportunities it offers. For instance, you could use the “Keep CALMS and carry on” slogan and plaster it all over anything that you can actually print onto, like T-Shirts, mugs, foreheads, powerpoint presentations etc and so forth.

CLAMS?
The next trick was to work out what the CALMS should stand for. This was the hard part, and required the input of some of the smartest minds in the devops world to come together and use their collective brainpower to think of some devops words that would conveniently fit the CALMS acronym. So, in May 2013 or something (lets say), some people with names like Gene, John, Jeremy, David, John and Adrian all got together at the top of a mountain in North Wales and meditated on the CALMS acronym. That didn’t work, so they all got really drunk and that’s when they came up with what we now know as the five pillars of devops:

C and S stand for Cats on Skateboards
As everyone knows, the vast majority of the internet is made up of billions of pictures or videos of skateboarding cats. That’s why the internet is so big (and that’s also where the term “BigData” comes from). Devops is all about deploying pictures of skateboarding cats to the internet, in order to satisfy the world’s seeemingly endless desire for more and more pictures of kittens doing cute things. The better you arer at deploying skateboarding cats, the better you are at devops. Simple as that.

A stands for Agile
Devops was invented because sysadmins felt they were missing out on the whole agile party. So devops is just agile plus sysadmins. AMIRITE?

L stands for Letters
Acronyms are nothing without letters. Letters are very much the key ingredient of a good acronym. The trouble with acronyms though is that the letters don’t always lend themselves to a word that’s relevant to your topic. One way around this is to think of a world beginning with that troublesome letter, let’s take the letter L for example, and let’s randomly pick the word “Lean”, and then simply write a book which demonstrates how “Lean” is actually quite relevant and applicable to the topic of devops. It’s a clever one this, because you can then use it to help flog copies of your book.

M stands for Money
Doing devops will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. A recent survey has discovered that firms with high performing IT functions are less likely to suck ass than one’s with crappy IT teams. It only takes a medium sized leap of faith to believe that this has anything to do with devops. So it’s crystal clear then – doing devops means your organisation will outperform your competitors and we’ll all be sipping cocktails on a beach somewhere by this time next week.

So what are you waiting for? Go deploy those skateboarding cats and I’ll see you on the beach!