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:
What Team Structure is Right for DevOps to Flourish?
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).
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
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.
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?
Operability can Improve if Developers Write a Draft Run Book
The run book (or system operation manual) is traditionally written by the IT operations (Ops) team after software development is considered complete. However, this typically leads to operability problems being discovered with the software, operational concerns having been ignored, forgotten, or not fully addressed by the development (Dev) team. If the software development team writes a draft run book or draft operation manual, many of the operational problems typically found during pre-live system readiness testing can be caught and corrected much earlier. Because the development team needs to collaborate with the operations team in order to define and complete the various draft run book details, the operations team also gains early insight into the new software. Channels of communication, trust, and collaboration are established between the traditionally siloed Dev and Ops teams, which can help to establish and strengthen a DevOps approach to building and running software systems.
I…
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Roundup: Patterns for Performance and Operability
I recently posted a review of Patterns for Performance and Operability by Ford et al on the SoftwareOperability website. I think that this book is exceptionally useful in its treatment of both performance and operability, and anyone who cares about how well software works in Production should buy and read a copy (there are paper and eBook editions).
Two other reviews might be useful too: my colleague Anant East (Head of Architecture and Infrastructure, thetrainline.com) wrote up a detailed review of Patterns for Performance and Operability on the tech blog at thetrainline.com, and I posted a short review on Amazon.
Summary of DevOps Summit London 2013
Here is a video interview I gave summarizing some of the main themes and discussions which came out of the DevOps Summit on May 23rd in London: a shared goal for development and operations; anti-fragility as a way for DevOps and ITIL to complement each other; surface the quality of the software for all to see; tools can produce a step change in behavior for the better; and use the theory of constraints to focus improvements.
Matthew Skelton 