As a biomimicry expert I believe in changing in an organic way by empowering people. When we talk about DevOps, we talk a lot about culture and how to create a culture of continuous improvement. All to serve our clients best and to become an agile and sustainable organization. But how to make sure the DevOps transition is and will stay a success? How to make it sustainable? Nature is agile and sustainable for 3.8 billion years. In this talk I will take nature as our DevOps teacher. Where do we find agility in nature and how can she teach us to become more agile. I will use some great examples of swarm intelligence, combined with examples (e.g. Dutch Railways) where I used swarm intelligence as source of inspiration to lead DevOps transition

1. Sustainable DevOps
Powered by Swarm Intelligence

2. Who am I?
• Mark Heistek
• Father of two
• Sport fanatic
• Owner of NEEEDLE
• DevOps enthusiastic
• Spreading ideas
• DevOps community member
• Co-organizer DevOpsdays A’dam
• Public speaker
• Avoiding waste
• ….

3. Biomimicry
(innovation inspired by nature)
• Model
• Mentor
• Yardstick

4. Sustainability
Sustainability is the process of
maintaining change in a
balanced fashion, in which the
exploitation of resources, the
direction of investments, the
orientation of technological
development and institutional
change are all in harmony and
enhance both current and
future potential to meet
human needs and aspirations.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability

5. CAMS
• Culture
• Automation
• Metrics
• Sharing

6. Swarm intelligence
• Simple rules

7. Swarm intelligence
• “Perhaps the most powerful
insight from swarm
intelligence is that complex
collective behavior can
emerge from individuals
following simple rules”

8. Swarm intelligence
• Changing the context

9. Swarm intelligence
• The task to divide tasks

10. Swarm intelligence
• “The best architectures,
requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing
teams.”

11. The advantages of swarm
intelligence
• Flexibility:
• The group can quickly adapt
to a changing environment
• Robustness:
• Even when one or more
individuals fail, the group can
still perform its tasks
• Self Organization:
• The group needs relatively
little supervision or top-down
control

12. Kilobot swarm intelligence
• https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=dDsmbwOrHJs&t=1
06s

13. Swarm intelligence at NS
• Your team is working to
increase revenue increase
• Your team is working to
increase customer
satisfaction

14. Swarm intelligence at UWV
• The task to divide tasks
• One big backlog of the
department (the hive)
• Separate backlog per
domain
• Connect to IT teams

15. The cycle of change
• From mission and vision to
self-organizing teams

16. Straight forward paths
• How we design these
upfront

17. Desire paths
• Facilitate them instead of
banning them out

18. Change to sustainable
DevOps
• Patience
• Do it quick
• Trust

19. Thank you
• Twitter:
• @Markheistek
• Linkedin:
• www.linkedin.com/in/m
arkheistek
• E-mail:
• mark@neeedle.nl
• Phone:
• +31 (0)6 24 80 62 22