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?

Continue reading DevOps Questions from Unicom DevOps Summit Feb 2014

Continuous Delivery Workshop with Neal Ford (@neal4d) – a Retrospective

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

I attended a workshop at DevWeek 2012 led by Neal Ford (@neal4d) on Continuous Delivery (CD). The day was excellent – Neal is a really engaging presenter – and I took copious notes, even though I’d already read most of the CD book. Fifteen months later, I thought it would be interesting to see how my notes from Neal’s workshop compared with my experience of Continuous Delivery, both within my job at thetrainline.com, and also in conversations with other people, particularly the good folks in the London Continuous Delivery meetup group.

The tl;dr version: go attend one of Neal’s excellent CD workshops, but be prepared for the challenges with Continuous Delivery to be much more social/organisational than technical.

Continue reading Continuous Delivery Workshop with Neal Ford (@neal4d) – a Retrospective

Summary of DevOps Summit London 2013

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

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.

Continue reading Summary of DevOps Summit London 2013

The Business Case for DevOps

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

[At the Unicom DevOps Summit on 23rd May 2013 in London I gave a talk on The Business Case for DevOps; here is a summary of the talk, along with the slides. Update: now with video too.]

With an increasing number of organisations turning to DevOps to try to improve their software systems, it is becoming necessary to provide the business case for introducing DevOps, especially in organisations which perceive their main focus to be something other than software systems.

For me, building the business case for DevOps has three strands:

  1. Using appropriate terminology
  2. Recognising the huge technology shift which has occurred over the last few years
  3. Emphasising the importance of operability in our software systems

Continue reading The Business Case for DevOps

Comic Relief, @garethr, @LordCope, and CloudFoundry at QConLondon 2013

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

I attended QConLondon 2013 last week; what I took from the first four sessions in the Building for Clouds track was: cloud API and infrastructure automation tools have now solved most of the ‘easy’ cloud problems, but harder challenges (such as automating clusters) remain. The sessions were from Tim Savage (@timjsavage) and Zenon Hannick (@zenonhannick) on Comic Relief’s unique challenges with performance testing, Gareth Rushgrove (@garethr) on how to avoid PaaS lock-in, Stephen Nelson-Smith (@LordCope) on how to use Chef to give you ‘optionality’ with different cloud vendors, and Andrew Crump (@acrmp) and Chris Hedley (@ChristHedley) on the CloudFoundry cloud platform.

Continue reading Comic Relief, @garethr, @LordCope, and CloudFoundry at QConLondon 2013