Devops Presentation Debrief

Last month, I presented DevOps to the folks at work. After speaking with Damon and John from the DevOps Cafe about it, they convinced me to put it up. I have finally got around to posting the slide deck and my recap of the whole presentation. I also did this impromptu talk at the Sydney DevOps meetup in October (Thanks Mick). The whole DevOps philosophy was well received, but CAMS really hit home with the audience.

Culture

I think this was the hardest one to push… trying to break habits is hard, but we are getting there. Simply changing the attitude among a few developers has had great results and they can really see a positive change. I have developers interested in issues that were traditionally “my problem”. I think persistence is the key with this one and sadly I think the whole industry needs a culture change.

Automation

Being mostly developers in attendance the ideas of automation really got them excited, so much so I talked to a few of the developers afterwards about some future ideas for automation in the development, test and production cycles. Internally, I am developing a continuous deployment system that auto-deploys the latest code changes to our environments. New to them, not so much to the DevOps world. However the spin on this for us is we are also integrating our metrics and automated tests.

Metrics

Although I have raised this topic with the team before, there was still a still a high level of interest. The difference this time that I demonstrated that metrics can provide an invaluable insight into live environments by showing them two simple graphs of Tomcat hits and the server’s bandwidth.

Sharing

I really believe that sharing has a great position in the whole CAMS idea… It allows the culture, automation and metrics to be all tied together and this was well received among the audience. I was trying to debunk the fear of sharing information, tools or processes, results in being made redundant. Sharing ideas, dashboards, shell accounts etc. actually improves your work and employability.

DevOps Life Cycle

Tying all this together I went through a “DevOps Life Cycle” (a spin on  the SDLC) explaining how DevOps can really support the business and our customers. I had some good feedback on this, as I showed how the concepts of DevOps could be applied within projects.

Question Time

Wrapping up I had a few questions. I had the typical “How can this be used in my project” questions, which were interesting because our large clients host our software with outsourced IT services companies, so it also raised the question on how DevOps applies to such cases.

Follow Up

One of the directors missed the presentation and reviewed it over the weekend and chased me up for a chat. He was specifically interested in the idea of metrics, and the revival of non-functional requirements for our software projects because NFRs are usually “out of scope”. He could really see the business benefit of DevOps, something I found quite refreshing.

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