Tales from the Real World on DevOps
In this episode Chris is joined by Thomas Thornton, a DevOps specialist at Kainos in Belfast, for a grounded, real-world discussion on what DevOps actually looks like at scale.
What’s covered
- DevOps as culture — why DevOps is far more than a buzzword, and how to bring stakeholders beyond dev and ops into the conversation
- Version control fundamentals — why getting Git right is the prerequisite to everything else in a CI/CD workflow
- Branching strategies — trunk-based development vs. feature branches, managing environment drift, and when fewer branches is better
- CI/CD pipeline design — starting simple, avoiding over-engineering, and incrementally adding checks and quality gates
- Infrastructure as Code — using Terraform modules vs. copy-paste resources, and the long-term payoff of DRY pipelines
- Kubernetes and GitOps — how pull-based GitOps (e.g. Flux/ArgoCD) enables scalable, consistent deployments across 120+ applications and multiple clusters
- Practical advice for all levels — tips for those just starting out, those mid-journey, and those looking to take a mature DevOps practice further
Thomas brings examples from a real environment spanning 83 Azure subscriptions, making this one of the most grounded DevOps conversations on the channel.
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