rethinking your devops strategy

Rethinking Your DevOps StrategyMandi Walls

Hi There

Mandi Walls Technical Community Manager in EMEA @LNXCHK mandi@chef.io With Chef since November 2011 EMEA-based since September 2014

Every Business is a Software Business

We’re going to be a software company with airplanesCIO, Alaska Airlines

DevOps

A cultural and professional movement, focused on how we build and operate high velocity organizations, born from the

experiences of its practitioners.

What Is DevOps Strategy?

• Tools• People• Goals• Priorities• Projects• Communication• ???

What is Your DevOps Strategy?

• Buy A Tool• Require already-busy people to learn to use it• Create obtuse workflows • Wonder why DevOps didn’t work for you• Hide the evidence

Thinking About Goals

DevOps is NOT the Goal

• Sort of got lost in Agile• “We’re all going Agile”

Why Are You Looking at DevOps?

• Shorter Time-to-Market for new features• Faster remediation of bugs• Faster response to customer needs and issues• Reduce outages

Articulate Goals

• Set measureable improvements You need to be measuring things at the beginning, too. Are you?

• Support experimentation You don’t know yet what’s going to lead to the best improvements

• Publish your goals and broadcast your improvements

Prioritize tasks

• Take work away from teams learning new procedures• Over-burdening teams learning DevOps will not create success• Never completing a single DevOps conversion will not create

success• Changing course over and over for whatever reason will not

create success

Support experimentation

• Some tasks won’t have “best” practices Many will have better practices that you should try

• None of this happens overnight

Technology

What Are Your Teams Already Doing?

• Are you using change control for everything that affects production?

• Is your source code viewable by everyone in the organization? Multiple apps working in same tech stack benefit from shared knowledge

• Are you Automating?• Are you sharing outcomes, metrics, data?• Have you gotten caught up in shiny things that haven’t helped

your goals?

Technology is to Help You

“We are able to focus on the small things that usually fall through the cracks, rather than on only the basics of the job. So many of the routine tasks are just taken care of for us. Seeing other offices that choose to do things differently and not embrace having the product do the “heavy lifting” are beyond my understanding. In particular, the extensive reporting in the product is so helpful for seeing how business is doing and what needs follow up.”hometrak.com/client-spotlight-lynn-gardini/

If a tool is making work harder, and your teams are working around it, change the tool.

Automation is Not Scary

• Applications might need some refactoring if they weren’t built to be used at scale

• Scale requires automation• Bad architectural decisions can hold you back

These are bits, not bricks

Culture

Culture Change is Hard

Permanent change isn’t built with contractors

Increasing Number of Resources

• Postmortems• Building blameless cultures• Building cultures with open communication

Healthcare industry• Building cultures with shared responsibility

Manufacturing

People

Your Employees

• Contractor culture No responsibility, no long-term strategy, no investment

• Burdened by cuts during recession• Prioritize, do not dump more tasks on them and expect success

Should I build a DevOps team?

• Yes and No• Yes: as a short-term solution to help with prioritization and

resources• NO: as a long-term reassignment of operations task to another

layer of organization

Development

Operations

Development

DevOps

Infrastructure Operations

Making Space in the Day

• Stop everyone doing low-value work• Is this work helping us reach our goal?• Is anyone using the outputs of this work?• Can it be automated?• Is it as important as something else?• Will the world burn if we don’t do it as often?

https://hbr.org/2016/06/stop-doing-low-value-work

Rewards and Celebration

• Give people a venue for pride• Internal talks and showcases• Internal DevOps Days• Invite speakers• Send people to events• Have a budget for parties or swag

Tools Culture People

Time

• It’s easy to get frustrated• Corporate cultures that favor short-term results make long-term

improvements challenging• Re-orgs, new executives, other changes will get in the way• Have an elevator pitch for what your initiative is doing right

when the environment changes

We are steadily improving the time to market in our consumer products by embracing agile development practices, proactive metrics and monitoring collection, automation, and rapid releases.

Attack the Mountain One Step at a Time

• Your organization has a lot of applications• Built by a number of teams and maybe external vendors• You need to get a good first-pass process the whole way from

idea to production release on one of these applications before setting everyone free

• Iterate when you’ve learned a lesson

• Remember the three areas: Tools, People, Culture• Lots more information, practices, use cases available now than

there were two or three years ago• Set your goals and measure your improvements.• Celebrate!

We are Chef

• https://www.chef.io• https://learn.chef.io

• Visit our booth to talk about Chef, system automation, continuous delivery, improving IT velocity, hugs, and stickers