DevOps 101

Ernest Mueller
@ernestmueller
theagileadmin.com
Questions I Will Answer Today
 What Is DevOps?
 What Problems Will DevOps
Help Me Solve?
 How Do I Get Started?
 What Mistakes Can I Avoid?
Who Am I?
The Problem In A Nutshell
 Everything needs software.
 Software runs on a server to become a
service.
 Delivering a service from inception to its
users is too slow and error-prone.
 There are internal friction points that
make this the case.
 This loses you money. (Delay = loss)
 Therefore IT is frequently the bottleneck
in the transition of “concept to cash.”
Symptoms
• Defects released into production, causing outage
• Inability to diagnose production issues quickly
• Problems appear in some environments only
• Blame shifting/finger pointing
• Long delays while dev, QA, or another team waits
on resource or response from other teams
• “Manual error” is a commonly cited root cause
• Releases slip/fail
• Quality of life issues in IT
Why Does This Problem Exist?
“Business-IT Alignment?”
The business has demanded the
wrong things out of IT
 Cost sensitive
 Risk averse
IT has metastasized over time into a
form to give the business what it’s
said it wants
 Centralized and monolithic
 Slow and penny wise, pound foolish
But Then We Demanded
Innovation
DevOps Defined
 DevOps is the practice of operations
and development engineers
participating together in the entire
service lifecycle, from design
through the development
process to production support.
 DevOps is also characterized by
operations staff making use many of
the same techniques as developers
for their systems work.
DevOps Defined
 DevOps is the practice of operations
and development engineers
participating together in the entire
service lifecycle, from design
through the development
process to production support.
 DevOps is also characterized by
operations staff making use many of
the same techniques as developers
for their systems work.
DevOps History In 60 Seconds
 ITIL, ITSM, ESM, etc. underdeliver in IT from 1989 on
 Agile comes to the developer world in 2001
 Lean comes to the developer world in 2003 (more slowly)
 O’Reilly Radar “Operations: The New Secret Sauce” in 2006
 Agile Infrastructure discussions start in Europe circa 2007
 Patrick Debois and Andrew Schafer meet up at Agile 2008
 O’Reilly Velocity Conference starts 2008
 Velocity 2009, seminal John Allspaw “10+ Deploys Per Day:
Dev and Ops Cooperation” presentation
 Patrick Debois and Kris Buytaert put together first
DevOpsDays in Ghent in 2009. Many more follow
 Lean influences enter DevOps via startup culture
 Large companies start branding DevOps “solutions”
Where Do I Start?
DevOps Concepts

DevOps Principles

DevOps Practices

DevOps Tools
DevOps Principles
• The Three Ways
• Systems Thinking
• Amplify Feedback Loops
• Culture of Continual Experimentation
• CAMS
• Culture – People > Process > Tools
• Automation – Infrastructure as Code
• Measurement – Measure Everything
• Sharing – Collaboration/Feedback
• Informed by the values in the Agile
Manifesto and Lean Theory of Constraints
DevOps Practices
• Version Control For All
• Automated Testing
• Proactive Monitoring and Metrics
• Kanban/Scrum
• Visible Ops/Change Management
• Configuration Management
• Incident Command System
• Continuous Integration/Deployment/Delivery
• “Put Developers On Call”
• Virtualization/Cloud/Containers
• Toolchain Approach
• Transparent Uptime/Incident Retrospectives
An Implementation Model

Service Service
Design Transition
(Dev) (Release)

Service
Operation (Ops)
Add Ops Into Dev
 Enhance Service Design With Operational
Knowledge
 Reliability
 Performance
 Security
 Test Them
 Build Feedback Paths Back from Production
 Monitoring and metrics
 Postmortems
 Foster a Culture of Responsibility
 Whether your code passes test, gets deployed, and stays
up for users is your responsibility – not someone else’s
 Make Development Better With Ops
 Productionlike environments
 Power tooling
Accelerate Flow To Production
 Reduce batch size
 Automated environments mean identical
dev/test/prod environments
 Create safety through automation
 Continuous Integration/Testing
 Automated Regression Testing
 Continuous Delivery
 Continuous Deployment
 Feature Flags (A/B testing)
 Security Testing
Add Dev Into Ops
• Don’t do tasks for people. Build tools so they
can do their own work.
• Monitoring/logging/metrics feeds back into dev
(and the business)
• Blameless Incident Postmortems
• Developers Do Production Support/Empower
Ops Acceptance
Grass Roots Checklist
 Find ways to collaborate – involve others early
 Find ways to automate and make self-service
 Become metrics driven
 Learn new things, continually improve
 Understand the larger business goals, metrics,
and priorities you support
 Communicate
 Work in parallel with small batches
 Allow refactoring
 Prove the business value to management
Management Checklist
• Experiment – choose a test case as a pilot
• Then document and spread best practices
• Empower your teams, but guide their values
• Metrics are your friend – demand measurable
outcomes
• Don’t accept excuses when the old baseline isn’t
good enough
• Fail fast, continually improve
• Build on small successes to gain broad support for
more substantive change.
• Align roles and responsibilities across groups –
enable collaboration even if it seems “inefficient”
Things Not To Do
 Only Token Gestures
 “Ops team, change your name to DevOps team!”
 “Put DevOps in those job titles!”
 Only Implement Tools
 Changing tools without changing tactics leaves the
battlefield strewn with bodies
 Create More Silos
 Devalue Operations Or Development Knowledge
 Anything You’re Not Measuring The Impact Of
Does It Really Help?
• 2014 State of DevOps Report (9200
surveyed) measured correlation
between high performing
organizations and DevOps practice
adoption
• Lead time to changes down
• MTTR up
• No alteration in change fail rate
Core DevOps Research List
• Gene Kim’s Visible Ops
• Tom Limoncelli’s The Practice Of Cloud System Administration
• Gene Kim’s The Phoenix Project (modeled on Goldratt’s The Goal)
• Jez Humble’s Continuous Delivery
• Michael Nygard’s Release It!
• Gene Kim’s The DevOps Cookbook (coming soon-ish)
• Various Mary and Tom Poppendieck Lean Software Development
Books
• Velocity Conference (velocityconf.com)
• DevOpsDays Unconferences – There’s one near you!
(devopsdays.org)
• DevOps Weekly newsletter (devopsweekly.com)
• DevOps Café Podcast (devopscafe.com)
• The Twelve Factor App (12factor.net)
• The Agile Admin (theagileadmin.com)