From Wikipedia (link):
"DevOps" is an emerging set of principles, methods and practices for communication, collaboration and integration between software development (application/software engineering) and IT operations (systems administration/infrastructure) professionals"
Sounds familiar? It should.
If you've ever been part of one of these groups at some point in your career, you probably said to yourself or heard things such as: "Those developers just want to rapidly push on us all this new technology but we've yet to handle issues with the currently deployed tech." or maybe "Operations are dinosaurs; they reject any opportunity to use our new software and make us stick to old outdated tech. without realizing the benefits of the new!". In essence, agile development creates change and operations want less change.
As organizations make the move to new technologies (e.g. cloud, SaaS, PaaS, WCF, .NET 4.0, etc...), the role of development versus operations teams is evolving and this change must be properly managed but, change isn't the enemy, the lack of alignment is. Businesses fail to see this and think pushing change down the pipe will magically break their reliance on monolithic applications and help them move towards more modern distributed service based applications. The fact to the matter is, distributed and loosely coupled applications are more complex to manage and also fail in a distributed way!
This type of change has to be monitored, measure and managed so both parties can establish a better communication and collaboration relationship. Can you think of any examples where this has happened to you? (post them in the comments)
Obviously, this post is merely skims the topic of "DevOps" but, I'm hoping it got you thinking a little and wanting to read-up on this more. I will be attending a presentation on Thursday more specifically on "DevOps" applied to addressing performance issues so hopefully I will have some detailed examples. I'll post a follow-up on this subject then.
If you've ever been part of one of these groups at some point in your career, you probably said to yourself or heard things such as: "Those developers just want to rapidly push on us all this new technology but we've yet to handle issues with the currently deployed tech." or maybe "Operations are dinosaurs; they reject any opportunity to use our new software and make us stick to old outdated tech. without realizing the benefits of the new!". In essence, agile development creates change and operations want less change.
As organizations make the move to new technologies (e.g. cloud, SaaS, PaaS, WCF, .NET 4.0, etc...), the role of development versus operations teams is evolving and this change must be properly managed but, change isn't the enemy, the lack of alignment is. Businesses fail to see this and think pushing change down the pipe will magically break their reliance on monolithic applications and help them move towards more modern distributed service based applications. The fact to the matter is, distributed and loosely coupled applications are more complex to manage and also fail in a distributed way!
This type of change has to be monitored, measure and managed so both parties can establish a better communication and collaboration relationship. Can you think of any examples where this has happened to you? (post them in the comments)
Obviously, this post is merely skims the topic of "DevOps" but, I'm hoping it got you thinking a little and wanting to read-up on this more. I will be attending a presentation on Thursday more specifically on "DevOps" applied to addressing performance issues so hopefully I will have some detailed examples. I'll post a follow-up on this subject then.
Managing and aligning technological changes ...
ReplyDeleteIs that what we call Tech. Governance, Migration Planning, Technology Insertion, Technical Debt Management????
Just asking ....
Yeah those are practices that can cover parts of the paths that development and operations cross. However, DevOps, seems a little more directly applied and gets stakeholders more closely involved. More this the topic later today.
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