Devops

Until recently I was not able to clearly articulate what DevOps is. Then one day, when trying to describe what we are building at Nirmata to an investor, I said something to the effect of, "its all about enabling developers to perform operations, using automation". That made sense to them; and, I've since started using the following definition for DevOps: Developers doing Operations using Automation

The Shutl engineering team has been operating with a DevOps mentality for over two years. We started by rebuilding our infrastructure under Chef and embedding our operations engineers into our agile product development process. We made great progress and saw a big improvement in delivery and quality as all team members were responsible for getting things live and ensuring their long-term maintainability. But… we still had a silo. Only a few of our team were doing the lion's share of the work when it came to maintaining our infrastructure, and on-call duties were shared by just a small number of people. Over the past six months, we've changed that. So, rather than extol the virtues of this approach - there are plenty of articles doing that! - we thought we'd share some of the steps we took to make every engineer a DevOps engineer.

This checklist is comprised of 48 items you can use to gauge the maturity of your software delivery competency, and form a baseline to measure your future improvements. It's not meant to say "you're failing DevOps" or deprive you of a badge (make yourself a badge just for reading this!), but surface areas of potential improvement.

A path to DevOps When Lara Hogan asked Bridget Kroumhout (on stage, at Velocity), "So, how did you get tricked into operations?" it was funny, but it got Kroumhout thinking. It's a question she's been asked before, and has sometimes been at a loss for an answer since she didn't follow a plan originally. Kroumhout now offers a plan-a wonderfully thoughtful and pragmatic set of resources beginning with culture (e.g., if you work in tech for even a little while, you'll notice that you have a lot of social and economic privilege, no matter your demographic identity, because you have more choices in your work and life than do many of your fellow humans), tools, education, community, and how to launch your career. Even if you're already well established, this is worth a read if only to rekindle your fire.

Community Interactions in DevOps

DevOps isn't just about Dev and Ops. It's about corporate management as a whole.

DevOps Days has celebrated 5 years since the initial conference in Ghent in 2009. With events in Helsinki, Vancouver and Tel Aviv just in the month of November, the DevOps Days series has taken place across multiple cities all over the world in these 5 years. InfoQ talked to Patrick Debois and Kris Buytaert, part of the team that organized the first event 5 years ago.

DevOps is a very successful meme in our industry. Most organizations these days seem to be saying that they aspire to it, though they don't necessarily know what it is.

There is lots of talk about what DevOps is and means, even a Wikipedia page, to which I may soon give some much needed love. However, a friend recently asked if I knew anyone worth hiring for a "devops" role, and I found myself asking clarifying questions about the sort of person he had in mind. Seemed worth writing down. The friend was looking for engineers. So what does it mean for an engineer to be devops-y?

A good write-up of an open spaces session at Devopsdays Berlin about the simplest ways of getting started with devops practices. Some good tips for anyone thinking about starting something.

A great starting point for anyone interested in the state of automation on Windows, especially if you're coming from a lInux environment. Lots of snippets to get started with powershell, Chocolatey packages and winrm.

RSpec tests for your servers configured by Puppet, Chef or anything else.

This months talk from DevOps.Net's James Betteley, gives us an experience report on how easy it is to get it wrong when key individuals don't get "on message". What's interesting is the differences in the behaviour and the language used by the teams who don't get it compared to the teams that do.

We wrote back in August about 3 "litmus test" questions about #DevOps in your organisation. We'd like to add 3 more questions that focus on the more operational aspects of DevOps.