DevOps Flow Lab turns the theory from The DevOps Handbook, The Unicorn Project, and DORA research into real missions. You learn by doing - not by reading.
Who is it for?
No tutorials with fake repos. You work on a fictional but realistic company, with legacy code, silos, and pressure from above. Exactly what it feels like for real.
You don't need to deploy yourself to understand why batch size matters, what WIP limits solve, and why DORA metrics say more than velocity.
Give participants something to fall back on after the training. Missions that anchor the concepts from your workshop - with measurable progress.
How it works
A fictional company with real problems. Long deployment times, silos between dev and ops, manual processes, and managers who want to see numbers. You are the new engineer.
Every mission is rooted in The DevOps Handbook, DORA research, or Team Topologies. You replay situations from the books - but as a participant, not a reader.
Deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, change failure rate - they move as you make decisions. You learn directly why certain choices speed up or block the flow.
DORA Metrics
These are the numbers when you join. You are going to change them.
Deployment Frequency
Nexus Corp
1× per month
Elite
Multiple times per day
How often does the team deploy to production?
Lead Time for Changes
Nexus Corp
3-6 weeks
Elite
Less than a day
How long does it take from commit to production?
Change Failure Rate
Nexus Corp
42%
Elite
Below 15%
What percentage of changes causes an incident?
Mean Time to Restore
Nexus Corp
72 hours
Elite
Less than an hour
How quickly do you recover after an incident?
You know the theory. Now the practice.
DevOps Flow Lab is not a summary of these books. It is the place where you experience them.
Kim, Humble, Debois, Willis
The three ways - Flow, Feedback, Continuous learning - are the backbone of every mission in the lab.
Gene Kim
The Five Ideals return as design goals: locality, focus, flow, improvement, and customer focus.
DORA Research
DORA metrics are not abstractions. They move in real-time as you decide how you work.
Skelton & Pais
Team structure determines flow. Missions around Conway's Law and interaction patterns let you discover that yourself.
Missions
Every mission is a situation, a problem, and a choice. Not multiple choice. Real work.
Map the value stream of Nexus Corp. Where is the waste? What is blocking the flow? You make the bottlenecks visible.
Based on The DevOps Handbook - Part I
The app lives on one server nobody understands. Containerize it so every developer gets the same environment, and every deploy is predictable.
Based on The DevOps Handbook - Part II
Nexus Corp deploys manually, once a month. Build their first automated deployment pipeline and bring deployment frequency up.
Based on The DevOps Handbook - Part II
Start for free with your Google account. No credit card, no installation. Just sign in and start your first mission.
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