I recently read a great article by Alan Sharp-Paul, cofounder and co-CEO of ScriptRock, called “You’re Doing DevOps Wrong. Automation in the Enterprise.” So I reached out to Alan for a Q&A session about DevOps. The following is a recap of our discussion.
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Barriers for DevOps Adoption
Companies that embrace the DevOps movement and implement the proper processes, tools, and culture change can greatly increase business agility and achieve higher levels of performance. What does high performance look like?
Agile without Ops Is Not Really Agile
Many companies use some flavor of an agile methodology today with mixed results. I have written about agile fail patterns in the past, but some companies do an excellent job of applying agile best practices yet still suffer from missed dates, botched deployments, and low quality. Why is that, you may ask? Because most agile methodologies only address the development side of the house and clearly ignore the operations side of the house. The two need to work in tandem to produce the desired results, which is the goal of DevOps.
How DevOps Can Help Automate the Pain Away
I spent two days at PuppetConf 2013 in San Francisco this week, and the common themes were automate everything, monitor everything, provide feedback early in the process, and focus on culture. All four of those topics aligned with the DevOps movement, with the goal of faster and more reliable deliveries. Companies that can deliver software more frequently with fewer issues have a competitive advantage over those who can’t.
Recap of PuppetConf 2013 in San Francisco
I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to attend PuppetConf 2013. When I walked into the first keynote session, I was shocked by the size of the audience. Over 1300 people were packed into the ballroom. Another 3700 had signed up to watch the event streaming online. Last year there were 800 people at the conference and only 300 the year before. Obviously, both Puppet and DevOps are hot topics these days.
Continuous Operations for Zero Downtime Deployments
The old way of delivering software was to bundle up the software and ship it, sell the software off the shelf, or allow customers to download and install it. In the “shipping model”, it was the buyer’s responsibility to install the software, manage the uptime, patch, monitor, and manage capacity. Sometimes the buyer would perform all of those tasks themselves, or sometimes they would hire a third party to handle it for them. In either case, the buyer of the software had total control over if and when the software was updated and at what time a planned outage would occur in order to perform the patches or upgrades.