On DevOps with Gloria Ramchandani

For this episode of the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re chatting with Gloria Ramchandani, Senior Director of Strategy and Business Operations at Copado. 

Join us as we talk about what DevOps does and how working over a holiday weekend on production deployment set her up for the career she has today.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Gloria Ramchandani.

The Essential Habits for Admin Success, now on Trailhead

If you haven’t checked out The Essential Habits for Admin Success on Trailhead, make sure to give it a look. We’re really excited for this new Trailmix.

What is DevOps?

“The term ‘DevOps’ was coined in 2009, to better describe better ways of collaborating between Developers, who actually build new capabilities on a platform, and Operations, who maintain existing production systems,” Gloria says, “and so the term DevOps is really a combination of Developer and Operations and bringing those two concepts together.” It’s people, processes, and tooling combined together into one role.

In tech, there can be certain concepts that can be really fuzzy—even when we’re trying to avoid gatekeeping and keep things inclusive. The problem is that many of these conversations are experts talking to other experts.

A misconception about DevOps, for example, is that it’s only for Developers and not for Admins. Gloria tells us the tale of her first production deployment. It was over 4th of July weekend, “and instead of hanging out with the rest of the family I was up in my father-in-law’s office,” she says. They had to do so much planning and coordination among their team and it was the first time her eyes were opened to the world of DevOps. “It was less about the ANT scripts themselves and the tooling, but it was more about the organization of the work and the team we had to support it,” she says, “that’s what so beautiful about DevOps: it’s not just the tooling at face value, it’s all the planning that comes with it and the processes and procedures and how you collaborate together as a team.”

How we can end release days

Nowadays, Gloria works at Copado, an organization focused entirely on Developer Operations. “DevOps is just as much art as it is science,” she says, “so trust your instincts and share what you’ve learned from others because the whole purpose of DevOps is collaboration and working together to continuously improve.”

“If I hadn’t spent those nights and weekends doing all of these releases, I probably wouldn’t be where I am right now,” Gloria says. That’s why she works in an organization whose mission is to end release days. “The better you can get at DevOps and working together as a team, the more time you can have back with your family and with others so you don’t have to spend a weekend doing a release,” she says.

Listen to the full conversation about the Toyota system, why if you’re an Admin you already have the skills to be a product manager, and how DevOps is like getting a perfectly cooked pork chop and a cool crispy salad to hit the table at the same time.

 

Podcast Swag:

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn More:

• This American Life episode about the Toyota System
• Essential Habits Trailhead Badge

Social:

• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 
• Gloria: @ThisIsTechChat
• J.: @J__mdt
• Gillian: @GillianKBruce@sunnydalelow
• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

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