DevOps Questions from Unicom DevOps Summit Feb 2014

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

At the Unicom DevOps Summit event in London on February 28th 2014 we experimented with some extra audience/attendee participation by asking for questions on record cards and encouraged people to ‘dot-vote‘ on the questions most interesting to them. There were some good questions, but unfortunately we did not get chance to discuss many of them, so here are all the questions from the card board, along with some very brief attempts at answers.

  • Should security be a part of DevOps?
  • To what extent and how do you insist on standardisation for multiple Scrum + ‘DevOps’ teams with no separate Operations team?
  • What’s the likely process flow of / disruptions to / duration of DevOps adoption?
  • Where does ‘Operations’ sit in the ITIL model? All over the place? e.g. Service Transition?
  • How about some example scenarios? Tangible comparison points would be useful.
  • Where does DevOps start and finish (from a process perspective)?
  • Is DevOps just a job title?
  • Is co-location of resource necessary for successful DevOps?
  • How essential is cloud technology to DevOps?
  • How will the announcement that ThoughtWorks are ‘open sourcing’ their Go DevOps product affect other vendor products? Why pay for other products?
  • There are a lot of open source DevOps/release/orchestration tools – is anyone using (or know about) the Windows equivalent?
  • How do you overcome developer resistance to writing Run Book docs? Are the processes to drive adoption? Is it a sackable offence?

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DevOps Summit December 2013, Bangalore: Software Operability and Run Book Collaboration

Posted on by Matthew Skelton

On 18th December 2013 I presented at DevOps Summit in Bangalore (organised by Unicom Learning Pvt), speaking about the improvements in software operability which DevOps can bring:

Software Operability talk at DevOps Summit Bangalore

One of the goals of DevOps is to make software systems work better in Production, and this characteristic of ‘working well in Production’ is known as operability. Here are the slides I used (available from http://www.slideshare.net/matthewskelton/software-operability-and-run-book-collaboration-29511196):

Software Operability and Run Book Collaboration – Unicom DevOps Summit November 2013, Amsterdam

Posted on by Matthew Skelton

I presented at DevOps Summit, Amsterdam on 14th November 2013 on Software Operability and Run Book Collaboration, and facilitated some of the sessions. Here are the slides from my talk, and the closing Q&A slides:

Software Operability and Run Book Collaboration

DevOps Summit 14 November 2013 – Closing Q&A

What Does DevOps Culture Feel Like?

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

I recently presented a webinar on What Does DevOps Culture Feel Like? in which I attempted to characterise what it feels like to work within a DevOps culture (part of the Experience DevOps workshop series).

Continue reading What Does DevOps Culture Feel Like?

What Team Structure is Right for DevOps to Flourish?

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Update (2022): my company Conflux now offers consulting and training around DevOps topologies and related practices like Team Topologies.

Update (2019): I have co-authored a book – Team Topologies – that adds brand new material to these (original) DevOps Topologies patterns. In the book we cover dynamic organization evolution, team interaction patterns, the strategic use of Conway’s Law, monolith decomposition, and many more topics.

See teamtopologies.com and follow us on Twitter at @TeamTopologies for updates. The book is published by IT Revolution Press (Sept 2019).

Team Topologies: organizing business and technology teams for fast flow
Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
IT Revolution Press, Sept 2019

Update (2016): A new version of these DevOps team topologies is now here: devopstopologies.com

DevOpsTopologies-screenshot
Find more DevOps team topologies at devopstopologies.com

The new version has many new topologies that we’ve encountered in the wild and we’re taking pull requests on Github for additions and changes.

The primary goal of any DevOps setup within an organisation is to improve the delivery of value for customers and the business, not in itself to reduce costs, increase automation, or drive everything from configuration management; this means that different organisations might need different team structures in order for effective Dev and Ops collaboration to take place.

Butterflies in a Museum
Photo by James Emery: http://www.flickr.com/photos/emeryjl/3535989711/

So what team structure is right for DevOps to flourish? Clearly, there is no magic conformation or team topology which will suit every organisation. However, it is useful to characterise a small number of different models for team structures, some of which suit certain organisations better than others. By exploring the strengths and weaknesses of these team structures (or ‘topologies’), we can identify the team structure which might work best for DevOps practices in our own organisations, taking into account Conway’s Law.

Continue reading What Team Structure is Right for DevOps to Flourish?