Inside DevOps with Stephen Shamakian

Stephen Shamakian, a DevOps Senior Principal Engineer at a leading health solutions company, shares insights from his journey into DevOps, which began in web engineering and automation, leading him to discover Octopus Deploy. He emphasizes that DevOps is a combination of people, processes, and tools, where cultural change, CI/CD process automation, and the right tools are essential for success. Shamakian's organization has standardized its DevOps pipeline using a build-once-deploy-many approach, resolving previous deployment inefficiencies and enhancing auditability through change ticket-controlled production deployments. He identifies the cultural shift and siloed operations as challenging aspects of DevOps but finds the automation that enables quick and reliable deployments the most rewarding. For newcomers, Shamakian advises learning automation and scripting for infrastructure paths and understanding build mechanisms for development paths, while also honing soft skills to communicate technical concepts effectively. He recommends "The Phoenix Project" as a valuable DevOps book and shares his interest in rocket systems, drawing a parallel between software deployment and rocket launches.