Is DevOps a Real Concrete Thing?

“DevOps is not something you can buy and it doesn’t come with a contract. But it is a real concrete thing. It is something you can do,” argued Don Jones, at this month’s TechMentor conference in Las Vegas.

While most of the attention with DevOps has been focused on the ‘Dev’ side, Jones wanted to bring some attention to the new mindset required for Ops teams.

Here are some worthy excerpts from his address:

“Companies get into the mode of pushing out software faster and faster. The Ops side has always said, ‘We can’t do it that fast, things will break. We’re not going to do anything that might break anything.'”

“That means lots of automation, it means shortening the cycles, shortening the time it takes to be comfortable with something so we can push it out quickly, and shortening the actual deployment process. The current waterfall approach to ops is a little crazy. We spend as much money to make things as reliable as possible, but there is diminishing point of return.”

“The problem with current approach is when we break things, we can’t fix them quickly. The whole point of DevOps is to do it faster. If we fail, we fail with style, but we can fix things quickly. It’s not about being agile. It’s about being quick.”

“Not every organization is going to be able to pull this off. Companies have to realize that they can fail, and they can recover from those failures and they can do so more quickly than they do now. It’s also essential to realize what is truly mission-critical, and to realize what you can live without for short outages.”

“This doesn’t happen unless big management buys off. That’s why DevOps is as much cultural shift. We can do this, but business has to want to whole thing. You can’t do DevOps halfway.”

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“The key to successfully moving to DevOps is to fail fast and recover faster. take it from a week to I can’t even measure it. Not changing is also failing, so failure is an option,” he said. “All we have to do is ‘unfail’ a lot faster than we can today.”