Episode 12

Love it or hate it, the term DevOps is here to stay... and we know who to thank

Guest: Patrick Debois (Jedi.be / DevOps Days)

Direct download

Follow John Willis on Twitter: @botchagalupe
Follow Damon Edwards on Twitter: @damonedwards 
Follow Patrick Debois on Twitter: @patrickdebois 

Notes:

• Patrick's blog (and information on his consulting) can be found at http://jedi.be/blog/
• Patrick founded the DevOps Days conferences (Europe 2010 is coming up!)
• Damon's day job is at DTO Solutions
• John's day job is at Opscode
• John and Damon are both speaking at Java2Days / Cloud2Days in Sofia, Bulgaria

Comments

[Robert]

Hi,

first of all - thanks for another great episode of this podcast.

Really cluture seems to be the most basic (and propably the first thing) that needs to move withing an organization in order to aim into the right direction.
All the time I hear something about DevOps in relation to organizations where dev & ops teams that are withing the same organization/company - even if they are at different locations around the world.

The really bad thing is that there are operations people out there who are not in this comfortable position to be able to have lunch with the guys that develop the software that they deplos. There are even operational teams that have never seen on of the guys who developed the software that they should deploy.
The deployment cycles and the level of service that the dev team provides is written down in a contract with the company that is sitting in India and develops the software.
In addition this contract is not visible to one of the parties - it's only visible to other parts of the organization or the management.

In this kind of situation the nicely called "wall of confusion" is as bis as the Chinese wall.
Sadly I am in this kind of situation and I think there are a lot of other guys in similar situations because they don't work in this nice startup companies where smart dev& ops guys could really work togather to build something that works.

Would you say that even in this kind of situation it is valuable to try to change culture, processes & tooling around deployment & bootstraps at least from the operational side?
I don't know if it makes sense to spend much work for this kind of hanges when you will never really reach the dev team with that.
I really like the Idea behind all that and I don't want to throw all that out of my mind only because I am not in the same situation as typical organizations.

Thanks again for the effort in this great podcast - really appreciate it.

Cheers
Robert

[Craig Wilkey]

Damon,

Just a quick comment about the "disconnect" you were talking about regarding companies who open source their code, yet protect their infrastructure management secrets...

I agree with you that the community, industry and discipline would benefit from open sharing of this information - but that's really not what this is about with Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc.
They don't share their code and open API's for the betterment of the IT community as a whole (though that may be the taglines they use in their media bytes). They open their code to get more people using it, more people developing for it and more people getting as many hooks into it as possible. The more indipensable they make themselves, the more secure their position is - it's simple economics in modern web architecture.

They don't reap these same benefits from opening the books on their operations - so why would they do it? If they had something that will bring them some renown as innovators (like kaChing's continuous deployment model) then they would milk it for all its worth and share as much as they have to - and no more - to do that.

By the way, on an unrelated note, if they are video segments, shouldn't they be called open LENS instead of open <I>MIC? :^)