death to the devops team - agile cambridge 2014
DESCRIPTION
Death to the DevOps Team! - how to avoid another silo Matthew Skelton, Skelton Thatcher Consulting Ltd. An increasing number of organisations - including many that follow Agile practices - have begun to adopt DevOps as a set of guidelines to help improve the speed and quality of software delivery. However, many of these organisations have created a new 'DevOps team' in order to tackle unfamiliar challenges such as infrastructure automation and automated deployments. Although a dedicated team for infrastructure-as-code can be a useful intermediate step towards greater Dev and Ops collaboration, a long-running 'DevOps team' risks becoming another silo, separating Dev and Ops on a potentially permanent basis. I will share my experiences of working with a variety of large organisations in different sectors (travel, gaming, leisure, finance, technology, and Government), helping them to adopt a DevOps approach whilst avoiding another team silo. We will see examples of activities, approaches, and ideas that have helped organisations to avoid a DevOps team silo, including: - DevOps Topologies: "Venn diagrams for great benefit DevOps strategy" - techniques for choosing tools (without fixating on features) - new flow exercises based on the Ball Point game - recruitment brainstorming - Empathy Snap, a new retrospective exercise well suited to DevOps This session will provide 'food for thought' when adopting and evolving DevOps within your own organisation.TRANSCRIPT
Death to the DevOps team!
How to avoid another siloMatthew Skelton, Skelton Thatcher Consulting
Agile Cambridge 2014,
Friday 3rd October 2014, Cambridge, UK
#agilecam
DevOps‘DevOps’
Team topologiesFlow exercisesChoosing tools
RecruitmentEmpathy Snap
Matthew Skelton
•Building & operating commercial software systems since 1998
•Cybernetics + Neuroscience + Music• control engineering• psychology• ‘network’ and group interactions
@matthewpskelton
Skelton ThatcherIntroduction and Services Overview
‘Cloud’ changes the way we mustdesign, deliver, and operate
our software systems
Changes for ‘cloud’
DevOps‘DevOps’
Not DevOps:
“Automation”“Build & Release”
“Infrastructure Development”“System Administration”
DevOps“Highly effective, daily collaboration between
software developers and IT operations people to produce relevant, working systems” *
*also QA/Testing, IT Service Desk, Programme Management, Commercial, Marketing, etc.
Sectors
•Tourism•Betting •Travel booking•Legal software•Healthcare
•Financial data & reporting•Government agencies•Foreign Exchange
Organisations
1.Financial data2.Legal software3.Travel booking
Team topologiesFlow exercisesChoosing tools
RecruitmentEmpathy Snap
Team Topologies
http://bit.ly/DevOpsTopologies
HT: @EricMinick, IBM
Organisations
1.Financial data2.Legal software3.Travel booking
1. Financial data
Goal: shorter Lead TimeNo ‘DevOps’ team
Challenge: define the purpose of the new team(s)
(‘naming things is hard’)
1. Financial data
?
1. Financial data
Are the main challenges technical?
(Clue: probably not)
1. Financial data
Evolve the team(s) over 2 yearsClarity of purpose
Spread culture
2. Legal software
Genuine ‘no Ops’
Challenge: avoid a ‘tooling takeover’
2. Legal software
? ?
2. Legal software
Grow an Operations capabilityUse and train the Support team
‘SRE’ or ‘Web Operations’
3. Travel booking
Service Desk silo
Challenge: slow or limited feedback from Production
3. Travel booking
??
3. Travel booking
Collaboration with shared toolsVisualise and broadcast
Retain Ops discipline
Team topology determines recruitment needs
Team Topologies
http://bit.ly/DevOpsTopologies
https://github.com/ SkeltonThatcher/DevOpsTopologies
https://twitter.com/EricMinick/status/517335119330172930
There is no ‘right’ team topology, but several ‘bad’ topologies for
any one organisation
Team topologiesFlow exercisesChoosing tools
RecruitmentEmpathy Snap
Flow Exercises
Experience DevOpsA hands-on workshop for
DevOps culture
experiencedevops.org
2 Dev teams, 1 Ops team
Ops team did ‘stop the line’
Modelling teams & constraintsSingle team
Two Dev teams, one Ops teamTwo service teams (Dev + Ops)
Provisioning delaysBacklog item prioritisation
“… organising the North of England’s
largest ball flow game”
Explore topology effectiveness with different constraints
Drive team topology with metrics from flow exercises!
Team topologiesFlow exercisesChoosing tools
RecruitmentEmpathy Snap
Choosing Tools
http://rashidkpc.github.io/Kibana/images/screenshots/searchss.png
“How does [the use of] this tool help people to collaborate*?”
* Work together, at the same keyboard/screen
‘How to choose tools for DevOps and Continuous Delivery’
http://bit.ly/ChooseDevOpsTools
‘DZone guide to Continuous Delivery 2014’
http://bit.ly/DZoneCDreport
How to choose tools for DevOpsValue collaboration aspects
Avoid a learning mountain: evolve toolingAvoid Production-only tools
Consider Conway’s Law
(this list is incomplete!)
Team topologiesFlow exercisesChoosing tools
RecruitmentEmpathy Snap
Recruitment
Don’t hire ‘DevOps’
Recruitment suggestions
Site Reliability Engineers (SRE)
Web Operations (‘WebOps’?)
SysAdmin + Git + TDD (?)
Recruitment suggestions
DiplomacyFacilitating
EvangelisingMentor
Deep specialism in SAN fabrics
Yes, we still need operationsMetrics
Layer 2 / 3 subtletiesRapid diagnosisFault heuristics
Incident response experience‘Battle-scars’
Recruiting for DevOpsDon’t hire ‘DevOps’
Don’t advertise for ‘DevOps Engineer’
Use SRE / WebOps / TDD
Don’t forget Operations skills!
Team topologiesFlow exercisesChoosing tools
RecruitmentEmpathy Snap
Empathy Snap
Empathy Snap
http://bit.ly/EmpathySnap
Recapitulation
How to avoid another silo
Team topologies
There is no ‘right’ topologyMany ‘wrong’ topologies for one organisation
Consider skills, core business, SLAs, …Evolve the topology over time (2 years)
Communicate the purpose
Flow exercises
Adapt to include IT Ops peopleLearning through physical interaction
Model and measure flowFlow exercises help choose a team topology
Other things
Consider the collaboration value in all toolsShared tools for shared responsibilities
Don’t hire ‘DevOps’Encourage empathy
We did not really mention:
Funding: CapEx vs OpExBonuses & financial rewards / penalties
Building a cultureConway’s Law
…
Death to the ‘DevOps’ team
Long live the DevOps team
Further readingBuild Quality Inbuildqualityin.com
Forewords by Dave Farley and Patrick Debois
Discount for #AgileCam !https://leanpub.com/buildqualityin/c/AgileCam2014
http://bit.ly/BQI-AgileCam2014
Valid until 10th October 2014
Further reading@annashipman – DevOps @ GDS (Build Quality In)
http://markosrendell.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/calling-devops-teams-an-antipattern-is-an-antipattern/
http://www.slideshare.net/Urbancode/building-a-devops-team-that-isnt-evil/15
http://seroter.wordpress.com/2014/08/28/8-characteristics-of-our-devops-organization-2/
http://devops.com/blogs/buzzword-abuse-anatomy-devops-engineer/
Allan Kelly on Conway’s Law: https://vimeo.com/channels/londoncd/85378217
