DevOps - How do you like your Unicorns, sir?!
I've been hearing a lot about DevOps lately, about the same as I was hearing about Openstack this time last year. I was wondering if all I was hearing was smoke/fud or if I would be impacted by being out of a job soon?! I saw a slide which depicted Developers as the King on the Chessboard and the way it was presented sounded like there was no more need for Operations/Infrastructure people at all. Everything was code.
What triggered a step up in my knowledge was a piece that The Register did on People & DevOps:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/15/devops_people_problem/
In particular I found the comments insightful. People were saying it was a load of baloney and with massive legacy systems and approaches, they couldn't see how it would work. I had previously thought DevOps might be all about the Tools - Puppet, Openstack, Chef, Ansible etc. One blogger I've followed for years is Scott Lowe who had moved from a VMware vSphere Guru to someone who is learning all about these tools. I was fascinated about why though. I'm not a Developer and PowerCli is about as far as I go with coding/scripting.
Scott responded to an email I send him and made a few very good points, mainly that scratch to word DevOps! It's all about the People / People in the Organization and how they communicate, share, and focus on the Business goals/needs/objectives.
One Book mentioned in the article was "The Phoenix Project" and I only got around to reading it last week:
http://itrevolution.com/books/phoenix-project-devops-book/
And.....it rocks!! I was feeling the pain of the fictional IT Manager with catastrophic failures occurring, deadlines, screaming and frustration at every level until they figured out what was happening and eventually straightened out the mess and got "DevOps" in place. Sounds like fairy dust?!! The Authors use the story to take you through the steps, mistakes and achievements each small change the team makes until you see the value of what this is all about. Now, maybe it won't suit many Organizations, or only the most desperate ones! But this is the book that finally made sense to me. I read one or two other books on "DevOps" but like ITIL (!) they bored me to death. A story on the other hand conveys direction, and I recognized things I've faced (and caused!) in my IT career in the book which was scary!!
So, this led to other research and I found myself reading "The Goal", a 30 year old book about this very thing but focused on a fictional manufacturing plant:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B002LHRM2O
So along with this I started watching videos from last years DevOps conference:
I've now over 12 more books ordered via Kindle to read and I've a lot to look at - I already knew about Toyota but want to learn more about Lean, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, CI/CD etc that I'd heard mentioned in the books & videos. I think the most important skill is going to be about dealing with the people part of this process so while I need to get familiar with the tools, this is not a quick fix, it's going to be a journey for me that will take a while to understand.
The videos from the 2015 conference are particularly interesting as one common thread was how this is a grass roots movement started from the ground up in those Organizations. It didn't get buy in from management until much later and the word "DevOps" was used as a curse word by the detractors. But by starting with only a few instigators and a bit of slack time they begin to chip away at the goal, innovate around them, introduce new tools (sometimes without consent!) to show how it actually helps and start proving to the teams around them that it has value. Real metrics, real delivery, real agility.
I watched the video about Google introducing automated testing in 2005 as the lack of it was strangling their ability to ship good code and there was a real risk of downtime yet it was a handful of Developers who championed it, not management! Check out the toilet training they did!
Target are the second largest importer in the USA and offshored all their code. DevOps was brought in by a small handful, it was a hard sell but gradually they got successes and started bringing more of their work onshore. They now hold annual DevOps days internally and invite external speakers to keep the momentum going. How about a Lab that invites teams to code for 2-3 days with a mentor sitting with them to show them how to do it better. It's more like a family event than a Business one!
The biggest light bulb moment I saw was when people declared the value they experienced no more so when it comes from a previous detractor! And boy do they complain when they move jobs and don't use it anymore!
Interestingly to me: HP also has experience in this area around Printer Firmware:
That's all I bore you with for now! If you're into troubleshooting, improving outcomes, working smarter instead of faster you might find some of the resources above enlightening, even if DevOps is a world away for you right now. I think as more companies embrace it I hope it will improve the working environments of many and force competitors to step up and the wave this creates will put people back at the center of the Organization they are in, instead of a number on a profit / loss sheet.
Bon Voyage!
P.S. Unicorns are organizations that are new and have embraced DevOps culture form the get-go. Think Netflix etc. Horses refer to older Orgs - watch the great video on Ticketmaster from the conference to see how even "old" dogs are ready for new tricks!
