We are around the corner of Black Friday and Holiday season, every SRE’s favorite season, because tensions are at an all-time low (wink wink) and Christmas Spirit is all around us.

Also, there is something else that tends to happen around this time - you guessed it - people are reviewing their runbooks! Hurray!

Runbooks are very peculiar artifacts in our industry, as they often suffer from extreme negligence and most are written without people pouring their hearts into the them, which makes them said and abandoned, never to be read.

Every few months someone in a leadership meeting discovers SLOs (Service Level Objectives), and what follows is something along the following lines: A spreadsheet appears where every service gets a row. Every row gets 99.9% if “it’s important” and 99.5 if “it’s not critical” because that looks good, “we will adjust it later”. A dashboard is built, a Confluence page is written, and then nothing happens for about eighteen months until somebody asks why we are still getting paged at 3am for things nobody cares about.

No matter how hard you work in implementing DevOps practices in your organization, there are always questions arising regarding the actual bottom-line value that it brings. Especially in larger organizations, where it’s easier to coast along without being noticed if your work is actually making an impact or not.

Recently I found myself in a position several time to explain to people both in and outside of the Tech industry about DevOps, the value it brings and is it just another trap to milk money off people and companies. So I have decided to make sense of my thoughts and put it all into writing, for future reference to myself and anyone else asking about what is the real value of DevOps.