DEVOPS CULTURE WHITEPAPER 2018

www.devopsconference.de

3 – 6 December 2018Munich

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Interview series with DevOps influencers – Part 1 

Collaboration or survival of the fittest: Who runs the DevOps world?DevOps is all about collaboration but it’s not always easy to put theory into practice. After we’ve solved this dilemma, we need to get past the “What is DevOps?” question and answer “Where do we start?” instead. We invited nine DevOps influencers to clear things up for you. 

DevOps: Collaboration or survival of the fittest?DevOps is all about collaboration — at least in theory. In reality, even though it produces great results, “collab-oration comes at a price,” according to Matthew Skel-ton,  Head of Consulting at Conflux. What goes into a good team structure? Should we deliberately introduce some sort of boundary between teams to make sure one does not overpower the other? The answer is more nu-anced than that. Case in point:

Drama aside, to all my Dev colleagues out there, please be considerate and stop killing your Ops partners.

— Arvind Soni, VP of Product at Netsil

DevOps doesn’t have to turn into a fight for supremacy. If you follow these key conditions, your team should be able to play nicely, according to an Accenture blog post published a couple of years ago.

1. Goal definition is the first step en route to team col-laboration.

2. One team approach is needed to build and inspire trust and mutual respect in your teams.

3. Diversity is key. Once you succeed in developing a closely knit team, the next step is to build sensitiv-ity around diversity as the teams have professionals from different regions and cultures.

4. A clear roadmap defines your path to achieving the objectives. Outline everyone’s roles and responsibili-ties, and how each team member’s work fits into the bigger picture.

In the first part of this interview series, we talked with nine DevOps influencers about the DevOps show and who’s really leading it. Plus, since the focus is slowly shifting from “What is DevOps?” to Where do we start?” we invited our DevOps heroes to clear things up for you. 

9 answers: Who is leading the DevOps show? Devs or ops?Charity Majors:  The center of gravity is moving to software engineers, who sit in the middle of a mess of internal and external APIs and services, trying to craft something meaningful out of it. Software engineers are who we should be building for … not least because there’s no such thing as “operators” anymore. Ops en-gineers write software too.

Ops isn’t going away, but ops increasingly lives on the other side of an API, instead of sitting next to you at work.  This is great news — you get to rent world-class operations talent by using companies like AWS, Fastly, and other infrastructure providers, talent that you likely could never recruit and hire yourself.

Mike D. Kail: The first tenet of DevOps is “Collabo-ration”, meaning that it’s about self-organizing teams

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and moving away from the concept of an individual or group “leading the show”.

John Arundel:  The point is that they’re the same people, whether they realize it or not. Developers are intimately responsible for how their code performs in production; good developers relish that responsibility because direct feedback (such as being on call) makes better software and better developers. Meanwhile, operators are the people who write the code which provisions the infrastructure, deploys the software, monitors the services, and so on; they’re just as much developers as the developers, but they work on a differ-ent codebase. Developers are operating, and operators are developing; that’s DevOps.

Gregory S. Bledsoe: Here’s a DevOps secret:  Mandates from one person or group to another don’t work. When you hand down an edict, you automatically engender at best indifference and at worst passive-aggressive resist-ance (and sometime macro-aggressive resistance!)  In this case, the only entity that cares about whether the new process or tool works is the person or group that handed down the edict, and everyone else is checked out.  

One of the two core ideas that started DevOps is Collaboration. Collaboration means negotiation, compromise, and diplomacy lead-ing to all the stakeholders feeling like owners of the entire process and toolset, and the outcome achieved. In this case, everyone is motivated to solve resulting implementation prob-lems. This is the genius of Deming’s point: turn everyone into agents of transformation.

To bring this back to the answer to the question: If any one person or group is pushing DevOps onto oth-ers, it isn’t DevOps.

Jérôme Petazzoni:  It takes two to tango, so I’d say both! The best developers are the ones who know operations (and how to write code with operations in mind). The best operators are the ones who know development (and how to automate their jobs). The point of DevOps is to make sure that both sides can (and actually do!) talk to each other. In some organizations, the pull to DevOps will come from developers (who are happy and eager to partici-pate in deployment because it ena-bles them to do a better job), in some organizations, the pull will come from operators (who are happy and eager to share the burden with de-velopers to empower them). But you need buy-in from both sides.

Thorsten Heller: From our experience, we’d say devel-opers have taken the driver’s seat position in DevOps. Might be a natural consequence due to the fact the op-erators often are that busy with keeping things alive, or with firefighting whereas a developer’s mindset might be more open to the new things.

Eric Vanderburg:  It depends on the company and the culture. One element of the culture that can be an indicator of leadership frame of reference is where sen-ior management got their start. Those that primarily started out in the services space sometimes have more operations-focused leaders spearheading DevOps while those that started with a software concept more commonly are development focused.   Frequently, DevOps leaders include the CIO, chief architect, di-rector of operations, CIO, or director of software de-velopment.

Quentin Adam: I think the majority of the demand comes from the developers’ side, from a long period of time where infrastructure stagnation and frustration have lead to this rush to push ops to give developers more space on management… Which is sad because

Core Agendashift Workshop: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented ChangeJulia Wester (Lagom Solutions)

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Sounds great, right? Then come to this Agendashift workshop and, in a safe envi-ronment, practice the skills of outcome-centric change facilitation, as described in the book „Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation“. Working on things that really matter to your organization, apply some powerful techniques from Clean Language, Lean Startup, A3, Cynefin, and Kanban.

The Agenda

• Discovery: Explore strategic objectives, obstacles, outcomes, change strategies

• Exploration: Debrief your Agendashift delivery assessment, agree scope

• Mapping: Build a transformation plan

• Elaboration: Learn how to generate, frame, and develop actions

The Outcomes• Practice in a range of outcome-centric facilitation techniques

• Awareness of the continuous transformation process

• Understanding of the integration of techniques and concepts from Lean-Agile, Kanban,

• Clean Language, Cynefin, Lean Startup, and A3.

Imagine… everyone able to work consistently at their best:

• Individuals, teams, between teams, across the organisation and beyond

• Right conversations, right people,best possible moment

• Needs anticipated, met at just the right time

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DevOps has to be a common and shared approach to help the whole team become more efficient, without overpowering one another. 

The result is often a “hello world”-driven architec-ture, mainly based on deployment agility sacrificing sta-bility, monitoring, uptime and security to the rush. The cultural gap with sustainability is clearly coming from the ops side and is not filled today. I hope the relation-ship will be more balanced in the future.

Hans Boef: For what I see, developers are taking the lead during their daily work. They need to set up a pipeline during the development process. In the various steps in this process, they arrange the right persons to do their jobs.

The focus is slowly shifting from “What is DevOps?” to “Where do we start?”How do we answer the second question? Charity Majors:  You start by making software engi-neers responsible for their own services. Putting them on the hook for the quality of their own code shortens the feedback loop and aligns their incentives with their users.  Operations is simply ownership and responsibil-ity for outcomes.

No service really needs an operator.  They need owners.  Mike D. Kail: The second tenet of DevOps is “Au-

tomation”, so I would first start with the basic manual tasks that can be automated, measure the productivity gains, and continue along that path. I will also add that ensure that the tasks that you automate are actually needed, meaning that they will serve to increase produc-tivity and efficiency.

John Arundel: Put your developers on call for pro-duction.

Gregory S. Bledsoe: Every organization is a special onion.  The reasons or pathologies that have resulted in the current process don’t suddenly go away because you want to do DevOps. Customarily organizations want to look at examples of what everyone else is doing and copy that.  

This is exactly backwards, what Deming called “man-aging for result” instead of managing the cause. Results are side effects of effectively managing the cause, and this requires two things.  A deep understanding of the operating principles of DevOps, and a deep analysis of the causes and misaligned incentives that prevent these solutions from emerging.  

An organization often needs outside help to do this.  It is tough to see your own forest for the trees, and both Deming and Drucker, whose principles form the foun-dations of DevOps, were big believers in introducing someone new into the scenario to diagnose what’s in the soup your swimming in.  This comes down to the power of the invisible bounds of culture.  

Jérôme Petazzoni: I once said, “one way to start your DevOps journey is to get started with containers.” But I have also said, “using Docker (or containers) doesn’t mean that you do DevOps.” I stand by both statements,

even if they sound contradictory at first. Using contain-ers (to facilitate onboarding and achieve consistent de-velopment environments, for instance) is a good way to get started. 

From there, you can move on to reproducible builds. Continuous integration is a great next step. From there, you can explore continuous deployment for QA and staging (for instance). And eventually, to production. It’s important to make sure that all teams are on board at each step, and remember that tools like Docker and Kubernetes are just tools, and can be misused.

Thorsten Heller: First thing to start: Mindset. Chang-ing the mindset and understanding both on the de-velopers and the operators’ side to make all of them understand the benefits and “what’s in it for me”. Then organization. And in the end maybe tools.  

Eric Vanderburg: DevOps can begin from the ground up or the top down.  Many successful DevOps stores started as a grassroots initiative. However, at some point, grassroots DevOps initiatives will need to have top management support. Likewise, top-down ap-

Off the beaten track: The Third Way of DevOpsMarc Burgauer (Arena Peak Ltd)

Gene Kim articulates: “The Third Way (of DevOps) is about creating a culture that fosters two things: continual experimenta-tion, taking risks and learning from

failure; and understanding that repetition and practice is the prerequisite to mastery.”Yet, as DevOps is getting popular traction, what we experience are misinterpretations (the DevOps team or DevOps Person), land-grabs by methods sellers or asking big consultancies to roll it out, instead of trusting seasoned and experienced practitioners.They’re changing work environments and relocate peo-ple routinely into new teams or locations. Solutions are all about reengineering work flows, not about meeting workers’ needs. We’re replacing old constraints with new ones and the transformation grinds to a halt.The Third Way asks us to reflect on our beliefs and go off piste to look for ideas to improve. We do little to understand the social impact when we aim to transform our organisation. We ask the organisation to adapt towards our engineering excellence and resist to adapt ourselves to the needs of the organisation.How do we gain situational awareness of the social network in which we do work and how does it help Dev–Ops? I will present experiences applying these ideas.

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proaches will need to have the buy-in of those in devel-opment and operations for the change to be successful. Leadership provides the funding and direction, but cul-tural change requires a much larger percentage of the company to take place.

Quentin Adam: There are simple and more technical questions to answer. If you really want to change the way it works, management has to change its point of view. Lots of companies have different budget and in-centive between the ops team and the dev team. Basi-cally, you have developers that need to ship new code to production as fast as possible to maintain the edge of their company, and on the other side, you have ops that are incentivized on making sure everything is stable, safe, and to reduce production costs. This leads to a con-flicting culture inside the company.

The best way to make them work together (the real idea behind DevOps) is to reunite the teams with only one budget and organization, with in-line goals. It will be a good signal from top management to help teams implement DevOps for real.

From a tech perspective, I think the best way to “go DevOps” is to start a clear inspection of the code base tooling: Is the project buildable in one command? Make-files everywhere? It’s the first question to ask because DevOps is mainly automation of the ops tasks. And the first thing is being able to easily build every source code in the organization. Building solid bases is important, more than setting up a complex distributed workload orchestration system. 

Start by automating things you already do. If you cre-ate lots of MySQL databases, then automate database creation, monitoring and backups; you will only be good at it if you do it often, you need to automate things you really do, not the hype stuff.

From a cultural perspective, developers need to un-derstand some networking and system level stuff; learn about Linux, containers, systemd and many others things to be able to speak with the ops. The Ops need to think about the future and learn how to code.

Hans Boef: I think we need to share best practices, in-fluence the right people, educate developers/operators etc.

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It‘s time for a shout out to DevOps influencers

Top 20 social influencers in DevOps 2018Who are the most influential DevOps people in the Twittersphere? After analyzing thousands of accounts, we created a list of people that every DevOps enthusiast or pro should be following.

All influential people have something in common: they can spread ideas faster and better than anyone else. We are aware that following these people has a handful of perks, including staying on top of the latest news and trends. Therefore, we decided to concoct a list of Twit-ter accounts all DevOps fans should follow.

The analysis ranks the top accounts in accordance with their social influence, although interestingly enough, not all household names of DevOps evangelists are on the list. Moreover, the list does not in any way rank a per-son’s character, skill set or talent; it reflects her/his im-pact on Twitter from an algorithmic perspective.

If you think we have missed you or any DevOps rock-star you know, drop us a line here. Nevertheless, we are very proud of the list that we came up with.

Congratulations to all influencers who made it into our top 20 list!

MethodologyWe first generated a list of twenty thousand DevOps-related Twitter accounts (including all accounts that contain the keyword DevOps in their bio or in any of their tweets.) To score the account and rank them ac-cordingly, we analyzed their social authority and reach using two key metrics: MozRank and Klout.

Moz Social Authority Score: Social Authority score is composed of:

1. The retweet rate of users’ last few hundred tweets.2. The recency of those tweets.3. A retweet-based model trained on user profile data.

Visit this MOZ blog post for more in-depth information.

Klout Score: Klout uses more than 400 signals from eight different networks to update the Klout Score daily. It’s mainly based on the ratio of reactions a user gener-ates compared to the amount of content he shares. Read more at the Klout score blog.

For more details about this year’s top DevOps influ-encers, check out the JAX DevOps blog.

Effective Leadership in Agile and DevOps EnvironmentsMichiel Rook (Independent Consultant)

The Agile and DevOps movements place a lot of emphasis on the autonomy, self-organization and responsibility of teams. A common misconception is that

there is little or no role for leaders of such teams.On the contrary! In this rapidly changing world, where competition is fierce and the pressure to deliver is high, effective leaders create environments that allow teams to thrive. They enable, coach and inspire.But what makes a leader an effective leader? Attend this talk to learn more about various leadership theories, how they can be applied in practice, and my thoughts on leadership based on experience as a tech lead and scrum master and from military service.

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TOP 20JAX DEVOPS INFLUENCERS

devops.jaxlondon.com

IN DEVOPS 2018

17. Dan Wahlin@DanWahlin

Developer, architect, technology trainer, author and public speaker

18. Thorsten Heller@ThoHeller

#CEO, Co-#Founder & Chief- #Geek at @greenbirdIT

19. Liz Fong-Jones@lizthegrey

Staff SRE, @googlecloud Customer Reliability

20. Jérôme Petazzoni@jpetazzo

Developer and system administrator#containers

13. Mike D. Kail@mdkail

CTO @Cybric. 25+ years of Tech-nology Executive Leadership

Experience

14. Gene Kim@RealGeneKim

DevOps enthusiast. Coauthor: DevOps Handbook

15. Solomon Hykes@solomonstre

Hacker & entrepreneur. Founder of Docker

16. Quentin Adam@waxzce

CEO @clever_cloud. IT automation and application sustainability

+39. Amitav Bhattacharjee

@bamitavStrategic leader with over 2 decades

‘of experience in the IT industry

+410. Bridget Kromhout

@bridgetkromhoutTechnologist, podcaster, confer-

ence speaker, team #opslife

11. JBD @rakyll

Programmer. Distributed systems observability at Google.

12. Jez Humble@jezhumble

Author, Speaker, CTO at DevOps Research

+4

3. John Arundel@bitfield

Cloud-native devops consultant, writing software for 35 years

1. Martin Fowler@martinfowler

Programmer, Loud Mouth, ThoughtWorker

2. Laurent Miltgen@kubernan

#Geek in the #cloud

4. Eric Vanderburg@evanderburg

Tech Leader, Author, Consultant, and Speaker

+3

5. Gregory S Bledsoe@geek_king

Disruptor-In-Chief. Gentleman Barbarian, Peaceful Nerd Warrior.

6. Simon Wardley@swardley

Corporate cartographer, chaotic evil, destroyer of

undeserved value.

+47. Charity Majors

@mipsytipsyCofounder at @honeycombio. Likes whiskey, rainbows, and

systems engineering

8. Tech Junkie@techjunkiejh

Experienced and passionate software engineer