Ellipsis

I’ve been following the "DevOps movement", since I was first turned on to Paul Hammond and John Allspaw’s "Velocity 2009 talk: 10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr":velocityconference.blip.tv/file/2284377/. Many of the precepts of their talk: infrastructure automation, automated deploys, version control, and shared metrics, have been part of my approach to system administration for some years now (albeit never to the extent that Flickr embraces these matters). So much of what they say, and what I see elsewhere in DevOps from following Chef and Puppet, resonates with an approach that I’m naturally tuned to. Not so much my workplace, despite nearly two years of quiet advocacy. Now, however, my workplace has come through the latest major release with more interest in evaluating how we do things than was the case during this last year’s headlong rush to a new architecture and infrastructure. So I scheduled a lunchtime session to view and discuss Hammond and Allspaw’s talk, and was pleased to have over two dozen people show up, and another handful call in to the conference line. Further, our senior VP watched the talk while he was on travel and responded that we should take seriously the direction in which Allspaw and Hammond point. I have no doubt the cultural hurdles will be harder to vault than the technological ones. But I have loved my work the best when I’ve been at the table with the developers from inception to deployment, and seen how well that works, so I’ll take heart from the positive response to this first small step. I’ll keep you posted.