Improve, automate, rinse and repeat: All aboard the starship DevOps Steve Ballmer once famously ran around on stage screaming "developers, developers!" You never hear anyone jumping about shouting "sysadmins!" or "quality controllers!". That’s because code conventional wisdom dictates that code trickles down from the ivory tower, while the boys in the engine room make like Scotty in Star Trek, …
I wonder how many dev teams in the UK can actually deliver tested software anywhere close to the numbers they gave for schedule & budget on a project?
My feeling is until you get to really big teams, whose resources make them effectively a large software house in their own right, very damm few. :-( .
And if you can't deliver the software on anything like the schedule and budget, but mostly the schedule. How can you say "I'm going to need another half dozen VM's to run regression testing by day X with this configuration and by day Y we'll take them down and need Z configured for production" when you have no clue what X, Y and Z are (in all honesty).
I suspect in 10 yrs time we'll find a small handful of companies (whose core business is not IT) have been doing this all along, but since they just got on with it and had no desire to tell anyone about it they never shouted it from the rooftop.
But maybe I'm wrong and this is the start of a glorious new world of gradually (and constantly) improving applications.
Exactly.
I doubt their management give a stuff about what OS is being run, how many VM's it's hosting or what the development language or package is.
But I also bet they get very annoyed with systems fail, upgrades don't happen on time or upgrades have bugs, and they've hired managers who will to the necessary digging to find the root cause, get it fixed and ensure it stays fixed.
IOW DevOps is the process IT developed to get the result. If something else worked better they'd to that instead. It was not imposed on them by the Board as "The Next Big Thing."
... or the sub-editors have at least.
The buzzword filter has been largely successful and obfuscating the byline is a sensible (if predicable) touch, but it is still a transparent HPE advertorial.
Setting aside the fact that a lumbering behmoth like HPE is about as credible on matters like these as CAPITA is on customer service, an actual article would have at least made passing reference to the fact that "Agile" frequently results in "continual release" because of frantic fire fighting against bugs that should never have gotten into the wild in the first place.
It would also point out that "DevOps" is a term meaningful only to PHBs because most developers work in small teams and have never had a developer, operations, QA segmentation. The Linux sysadmin being the same guy as the PostgreSQL ER modeler and SQL coder is the normal state of affairs (statistically). Astonishingly they also often manage to do this without buying any specialist tools or management consultancy services!
Siloing these functions is an obscure, outlier practice that has only ever existed in giant bureaucracies, commonly called "enterprises". Most dev and ops people work in companies with less than 1000 employees, just like most people in general.
Deciding to do what the majority have been doing all along by dismantling the last round of PHB/MBA/Gartner inspired nonsense does not mean you have invented something new or even, frankly, interesting. Anyone out there still doing "Extreme Programming"?
I love how you mentioned Gartner. The shop that I worked for that did DevOps (poorly), were always going on about getting into the "Magic Quadrant." Basically if you pay Gartner enough money, pay to go to their conferences and tow their line, you somehow end up in the "Magic Quadrant" and suddenly get business from other idiots who think that Gartner is something more than a marketing company. Laughable at best.
As with most things, it starts with a mindset.
In the case of the "Magic Quadrant" the relevant mindset is, self evidently, "Magical Thinking" facilitating adoption of "Magical Realism" as a C-Suite world view.
The opportunities and efficiencies possible once you realise that both Hogwarts and Star Trek technology can be applied simultaneously are astounding! It is no wonder that the PHBs/MBAs get frustrated with the small minded drones below who cannot grasp this new paradigm.
The reason companies get into the whole ITIL shenanigans is that the Dev teams have been lobbing hot steaming piles of shit over the wall to OPS; This ends up with the ops and sys admin people being labelled as stick in the mud/slow to respond/no fun killljoys when they try to manage the unholy tide of excrement rolling over the battlements.
Problem is when you've been called out at 3am for the third night in a row because some muppet didn't bother check to see if an given input file did/didn't exist before trying to open it; thoughts turn somewhat murderous.
DevOps is in my opinion a great idea, Automated system build/config management (Salt/Puppet/whatever), a good wiki , continuous build, testing & integration ... all fantastic BUT the one thing I think should be added to DevOps? Devs should be on call with the rest of us. I've noticed that the quality of their testing & release tooling + the code they deliver gets much much better when they are also on the hook for the 3am bloody call outs
One of the (very few) areas a bit of ISO9000 can help.
Punt the "File not Found" bug back to dev as a defect report. Demand a written report detailing the nature of the defect, how the defect arose, what procedural changes have been made to avoid a recurrence (written copies of said amended procedures, naturally) and what monitoring strategy will be applied over the next <appropriate timeframe> to verify that the amended procedures worked.
This has much the same effect on trigger happy devs as a cattle prod in the nether regions. Wash, rinse, repeat as required ... in my experience it never is.
I am a Dev incidentally. I never experienced the above because I started with MoD work where a "crash" meant your bug just brought down a plane and Ops carried firearms.
On the money, Lysenko!
(Many moons back, I worked on Intelligence systems in an interesting place elsewhere on the planet ... mistakes were not a clever thing. This was before the days of ISO9000, and before this newfangled Agile stuff). Will stop before this becomes a rant ...
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