The notorious, rickety launch of Healthcare.gov frustrated countless Americans and embarrassed the president and his aides. But it also served as a call-to-action for Washington, said Paula Thrasher, application delivery lead at Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC). The D.C.-area IT company works intimately with many government organizations to make programs and applications accessible to government employees and the public.

“I think there’s nothing better to get a conversation going like a crisis,” Thrasher told Brian Gracely, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the DevOps Enterprise Summit. “In a weird way, I think Healthcare.gov was the crisis we needed to have DevOps in the federal government,” she said.

DevOps, she explained, had until then been viewed as a side project that few folks in government were passionate enough about. The Healthcare.gov debacle helped make DevOps a much larger part of the conversation in Washington.

DevOps not just a technology, but also a cultural revolution

Thrasher said that while the technological challenges of DevOps and moving customers to the public cloud are considerable, the growing pains are felt most in a company’s culture.

“The idea that infrastructure is code, the idea that you’re just going to automate” can be difficult for the staff to acclimate too, she said. Ironically, and precisely because of the greater ease and efficiency they offer, DevOps and cloud can sometimes catch workers off guard.

She related an actual instance at CSC where a client made a request, and, “The project manager instantly said, ‘That will be two weeks.’ And while he was saying that to me, his lead engineer in the background was like, ‘I got it!'”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE