Mission: Facilitate Campus’ transition to the cloud while encouraging modern DevOps practices.

Also see information on the Cornell IT web site: https://it.cornell.edu/cornell-cloud

Guiding Principles

  • Sharers - We don’t keep information to ourselves. We always think about how a system, process, etc. needs to be run without us involved.
  • Systems Thinkers - We think about how the entire system is created, not just the infrastructure, not just the application code, not just the configuration, not just the database. Everything. We look at optimizing the whole system, not just sub-optimizing a part of the system.
  • Automation - We constantly seek ways to automate repetitive activities. We also realize that automation can lead to more than just tactical improvements. When applying systems thinking to problems, we seek to create automation systems for the entire software systems lifecycle versus a series of scripts and tactical improvements
  • Collaborative and Encouraging - The goal is to create a peer network of high performance collaborative system teams that inter-work and cause the environments to ever improve, while creating positive, fun work interactions that foster excellence.
  • Humble - Realize there is more than one way to do something. You can be right without being a jerk about it or “You can disagree without being disagreeable”
  • Continuous everything - We think that everything in a software system can run through a continuous process.
  • Continuous Improvement - We are curious and are constantly learning. We constantly tweak processes, systems, software to improve
  • Continuous feedback - The quicker people get useful feedback, the better. We’re seeking to reduce process times and wait times so that they get feedback quicker.
  • User Experience - We focus on user experience: we think about where coworkers, stakeholders, customers, etc. are coming from and this guides many other traits.
  • Self-Service - We seek to make all systems we create self-service for our customers.
  • Root-cause analysis - We are constantly seeking the root cause of problems rather than just the symptoms