Three basic terms

These 3 basic terms are fundamental for projects to understand as they consider adopting a development method incorporating Operate First.

Operate First

Operate First is about bringing software under development to a production cloud so that operation of the software can be understood and developed. As such, Operate First is a concept and methodology, akin to open source. It’s not code. It does not have a license. It’s not hardware or a cloud. It is a way of connecting all stakeholders of building, deploying, and operating software and sharing code, data, and knowledge - similar to open source communities, where users and developers of a piece of software come together.

Operate First Environment

An Operate First Environment is an instantiation of a production cloud environment where projects can bring their software to practice Operate First. The Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) provides an initial example of an Operate First environment through their “zero cluster.”

Open Infrastructure Labs

Open Infrastructure Labs is an open source upstream where cloud providers and operators work together with project developers to advance the state of the art for managing open source clouds. Its relation to Operate First is that it provides a place where projects that are operating first tend to work together. This work is done in an open community with collaboration from cloud operators as well as other projects in order to develop and evolve operations.