• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

  • Home
  • ESXTOP
  • Stickers/Shirts
  • Privacy Policy
  • About
  • Show Search
Hide Search

We are DevOps

Duncan Epping · Nov 27, 2014 ·

devopsOver the last couple of months I have started running in to more and more customers who are wondering what that DevOps thing is they keep hearing about. They want to know if they need to start hiring DevOps engineers and which software they need to procure for DevOps. I more or less already alluded to what I think it really is or means in my blog post about The Phoenix Project, let me re-use a quote from the review that I wrote for that book:

After reading the book I am actually left wondering if DevOps is the right term, as it is more BizDevOps then anything else. All of IT enabling the development of business through operational efficiency / simplicity.

DevOps is not something you buy, it is not about specific tools you use, it is a state-of-mind … an operational model, a certain level of maturity. I would argue that it is just a new fancy way of describing IT maturity. At VMware we have had this professional services engagement called Operational Readiness where IT (Ops and Dev) and business owners would be interviewed to identify the shortcomings in terms of the IT offerings and agility, the outcome would a set of recommendations that would allow an organization to align better with the business demands. (This engagement has been around for at least 6 years now to my knowledge.)

Typically these types of engagements would revolve around people and process and focus less on the actual tools used. The theme of the recommendations generally was around breaking down the silos in IT (between the various teams in an IT department: dev / ops / security / networking / storage), and of course reviewing processes / procedures. It is strange how even today we still encounter the same types of problems we encountered years ago. You can deploy a new virtual machine in literally minutes, you can configure physical servers in about 10 minutes (when the installation is fully automated)… yet it takes 3 weeks to get a networking port configured, 2 weeks to get additional LUNs, 4 days to prepare that test/dev environment or even worse the standard change process from start to finish takes 6 weeks.

What is probably most striking is that we live in an ever changing world, the pace at which this happens is unbelievably fast and we happen to work in the industry which enables this… Yet, when you look at IT (in most cases) we forget to review our processes (or design) and do not challenge the way we are doing things today. We (no not you I know, but that guy sitting next to you) take what was described 5 years ago and blindly automate that. We use the processes we developed for the physical world in a virtualized world, and we apply the same security policies and regulations to a virtual machine as to a physical machine. In many cases, unfortunately, from a people perspective things are even far worse… no communication whatsoever between the silos besides through an ancient helpdesk ticketing tool probably, sadly enough.

In todays world, if you want to stay relevant, it is important that you can anticipate as fast as possible to the (ever changing) demands of your business / customers. IT has the power to enable this. This is what this so-called “Operational Readiness” was there for, identify the operational and organizational pain-points, solve them and break down those silos to cater for the business needs. In todays world the expected level of operational maturity is a couple of levels higher even, and that level is what people (to a certain extent) refer to when they talk about DevOps in my opinion.

So the question then remains, what can you do to ensure you stay relevant? Lets make it clear that DevOps is not something you buy, it is not a role in your organization, and it is not a specific product, it is an IT mindset… hence the title: we are DevOps. Joe Baguley’s keynote at the UK VMUG was recorded, and although he did not drop the word DevOps he does talk about staying relevant, what it is IT does (provide applications), how you can help your company to beat the competition and what your focus should be. (On top of that, he does look DevOps with his beard and t-shirt!) I highly recommend watching this thought provoking keynote. Make sure to sit down afterwards, do nothing for 30 to 60 minutes besides reflecting back on what you have done the last 12 months and then think about what it is you can do to improve business development, whether new or existing markets, for your company.

Related

Management & Automation, Various devops

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. mimmus says

    27 November, 2014 at 15:23

    With “staying relevant” you mean also “keeping a job as system admin”?
    From my point of view, it is a job that is losing importance, focus is all about “development” (Docker, DevOps, …)

    • Duncan Epping says

      27 November, 2014 at 15:26

      I don’t really agree with that… “development” is just one aspect of the many disciplines within IT, it is just that your role as a sys admin evolves once again. You may have started managing physical servers, then you shifted to virtualization, now you are also involved with storage and networking maybe, or potentially automation etc etc… IT work won’t disappear, it will just change.

  2. clbarnett says

    29 November, 2014 at 02:51

    Psst… ‘alluded’, not ‘eluded’.

    • Christiaan says

      30 November, 2014 at 21:14

      I have to agree with u Duncan. I had a few engagements this week and Time to market is shocking but what I have found, is that there is a new Silo approach in IT. IaaS and PaaS now a silo but fails to deliver some proper Dev/Ops environments. I’ve seen how the new Cloud IaaS and procedures/billing round it is labelled as Cloud. But is it? It is just another SILO called IaaS that does not deliver agility to business but in some cases hurts IT’s reputation. It does help the sys admin 😉

  3. Kyle Hailey says

    5 December, 2014 at 21:08

    Exactly:

    “You can deploy a new virtual machine in literally minutes, you can configure physical servers in about 10 minutes (when the installation is fully automated)… yet it takes 3 weeks to get a networking port configured, 2 weeks to get additional LUNs, 4 days to prepare that test/dev environment”

    When I tell people there is something called data virtualization that would solve this problem, often I get an eye roll. Then when I explain that if I want an environment for dev or QA and that environment requires a large data source like a multi terabyte database how long does it take to get? Typically days which means data values gets out of date and even worse the schema can get out of date. Now with data virtualization, a.k.a thin cloning or copy data management, one can spin up a 10TB database in a couple of minutes with almost no storage. Companies like Delphix even have a developer interface for refreshing, branching, rollback, versioning and sharing of data states. Other companies like Actifio, Oracle and Datical offer some form of copy data management.

    Here is a blog post that goes into the problem and solution :

    Continuous integration and continuous delivery offers huge efficiency gains for companies but is continuous integration even possible when the application’s backbone is a massive relational database. How can one spin up database copies for developers, QA, integration testing, and delivery testing ? Its not like Chef or Puppet can spin up a 10TB database copy in a few minutes the way one can spin up a Linux VM.

    There is a way and that way is called data virtualization which allows one to spin up that 10TB database in minutes as well as branch a copy of that 10TB from Dev to QA, or for that matter branch several copies and all for a very little storage.

    see more at http://datavirtualizer.com/is-continuous-integration-compatible-with-database-applications/

    • Duncan Epping says

      8 December, 2014 at 14:21

      Thanks for your reply and the link to the article. Excellent read about some of the challenges experiences in the world of continuous delivery. As I wrote today, the application architecture / landscape will determine how efficient (and agile) you can be : http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2014/12/08/operational-efficiency/

      Thanks, much appreciated reading your post, very helpful and insightful.

  4. Robert Wipfel says

    14 December, 2014 at 18:21

    Beyond DevOps, as a means to democratize Data Center Orchestration (the ‘O’ in DCOS), some people have spent time thinking about #FluidIT: https://prezi.com/o3xfs-acv1fj/what-is-iwm/. As the former Burton Group DC guys will tell you: one missing link is Identity (Authnz/Approval/Audit) needed for GRC. That legacy Helpdesk will tweet DCOS/SSDC activity and offer chat for Incident Management. The SD in SDDC should really mean Service-Driven, Data-Center, because Software-Defined is merely an obvious implementation detail, for what’s really required, is what you wrote: Operational Efficiency.

  5. Andy Jenkins says

    9 January, 2015 at 00:43

    Great Summary of the changing world of IT, and need to remain relevant both as a vendor and personally to understand the Skill Set you will need to survive in the 3rd Platform / Cloud Native World.

Primary Sidebar

About the author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Platform BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007), the author of the "vSAN Deep Dive", the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive” series, and the host of the "Unexplored Territory" podcast.

Upcoming Events

May 24th – VMUG Poland
June 1st – VMUG Belgium
Aug 21st – VMware Explore
Sep 20th – VMUG DK
Nov 6th – VMware Explore
Dec 7th – Swiss German VMUG

Recommended Reads

Sponsors

Want to support Yellow-Bricks? Buy an advert!

Advertisements

Copyright Yellow-Bricks.com © 2023 · Log in