What sort of DevOps are you?

What sort of DevOps are you? Can you even define DevOps?

 

Nobody really knows what DevOps is, there are almost as many definitions as practitioners. Part of the problem is that the name tends to get tacked onto anything to make it seem trendy. (The same way that "cloud" has been abused.)

 

Whilst stereotypical, I tend to separate the field into the puritans and the pragmatists.

 

The puritanical vision of DevOps is summarized by the mantra of "Infrastructure as Code". In this world, it's all about tooling (often, although not exclusively, based around configuration management).

 

From the pragmatist viewpoint, it's rather about driving organizational and cultural change to enable people to work together to benefit the business, instead of competing with each other to benefit their own department or themselves. This is largely a reaction to legacy departmental silos that simply toss tasks over the wall to each other.

 

I'm firmly in the pragmatist camp. Tooling helps, but you can use all the tools in the world badly if you don't have the correct philosophy and culture.

 

I see a lot of emphasis being placed on tooling. Partly this is because in the vendor space, tooling is all there is - vendors frame the discussion in terms of how tooling (in particular, their tool) can improve your business. I don't have a problem with vendors doing this, they have to sell stuff after all, but I regard conflating their offerings with DevOps in the large, or even defining DevOps as a discipline, as misleading at best.

 

Another worrying trend (I'm seeing an awful lot of this from recruiters, not necessarily practitioners) is the stereotypical notion that DevOps is still about getting rid of legacy operations and having developers carry the pager. This again starts out in terms of a conflict between Dev and Ops and, rather than resolving it by combining forces, simply throws one half of the team away.

 

Where I do see a real problem is that smaller organizations might start out with only developers, and then struggle to adopt operational practices. Those of us with a background in operations need to find a way to integrate with development-led teams and organizations. (The same problem arises when you have a subversive development team in a large business that's going round the back of traditional operations, and eventually find that they need operational support.)

 

I was encouraged that the recent DOXLON meetup had a couple of really interesting talks about culture. Practitioners know that this is important, we really need to get the word out.