An executive level conference on Hosting & Cloud Transformation -- sponsored by a who's who of vendors -- is coming up in Vegas in Sept. More info is available here. We think that the adoption of cloud environments, especially in the spheres of dev and test, is going to drive the adoption of DevOps methodologies and tools.
I found this month old blog on DevOps and the cloud and it resonated very well with how we've found ourselves presenting the information. It's a great write-up and the best summary I've seen to date. Matt Zimmerman and you can find Matt Zimmerman's DevOps-Cloud blog post here.
I think it is pretty clear that Agile is not a passing fad in application development. Every enterprise CIO and CTO, I speak with is either fully embracing Agile or is seriously experimenting with it as a way to drive more incremental change and faster application delivery. So from my point of view, we are well into the early majority for adoption of Agile development methodologies.
Just as Agile has driven a closer relationship between business and development - DevOps is about a closer relationship between development and operations. Whether we will see the emergence of the DevOps analog for scrum-masters or pair-programming - I am not sure. But I believe we are well on the way to seeing DevOps as the emerging moniker for a new methodology of application transition and release management.
Some people will continue to doubt and call these movements fads. Hey, I still run into the occasional IT manager that thinks "Agile" is just an excuse for an undisciplined development effort - and clearly it can be. But to ignore the possible value of a closer relationship between Development and Operations - seems like a risk that may CIOs will soon not be willing to take. Especially when the negative impacts on performance - in terms of productivity and outages - can be very high.
At the Boston Microsoft campus, there's a DevOps Meet-up on August 3rd at 6pm. You can see more about it here. And you can register for it here.
Post it Notes = Agile
Many of us with experience on agile development teams have used "post-it notes" and "card walls" to manage requirements and development work. These tools work well for teams that are collocated and relatively small. But as agile methodologies have matured, teams have gotten larger and more distributed. The market has responded with great tools like Rally (http://www.rallydev.com). Now we can collaborate on agile development processes without needing to be in the same physical room - reviewing the same physical cards on the wall. And of course, now that these agile processes are embodied in software we are seeing value beyond managing the cards themselves.
Spreadsheets = Deployment Coordination
In a similar way - today's deployment processes are primarily coordinated with spreadsheets and conference calls. These tools have worked well - but they are starting to show signs of strain as the rate of deployments increases. (This is especially true in organizations that are adopting Agile development methodologies.) There are 2 key issues with spreadsheets for deployment coordination:
*1. Manual automation - it may seem like a contradiction in terms but most deployment automation scripts are manually launched at the command line by a system admin or deployment engineer. During this fundamentally manual process, a momentary typo in a script parameter can create hours of downstream trouble-shooting and repair work. If you have had any exposure to n-tier application deployment you know that there has to be a better way to do this. One customer we worked with had 2 system administrators assigned to each production deployment - one to type in the commands and another to review and verify each command (letter by letter) before it was executed. Now that's expensive.
*2. Which spreadsheet? - when the list of activities to be coordinated grows beyond a handful teams frequently need to change and update the spreadsheet. Managing the versions of the spreadsheet and tweaking it to accommodate unique steps for this release becomes a full time activity. Checking it into version control is one strategy - but is the one in version control the latest copy? Does the operations team have access to version control? Probably not.
Both of these challenges call for a solution that is lightweight and easy to use - but gives structure to the process and allows you to execute your existing automation.
StreamStep Co-Founder, Clyde Logue, brings a wealth of experience designing, delivering, and implementing enterprise software products and services to his role at StreamStep where he is responsible for defining the product and go-to-market strategies.
Prior to co-founding StreamStep, Clyde was Director of Release Management at Liberty Mutual, where he oversaw and lived the challenges of release management firsthand. Previously, he co-founded mValent (acquired by Oracle) with Duane Tharp, StreamStep CEO, leading all early marketing and product management activities. Clyde holds an MBA from The Amos Tuck School at Dartmouth College and Bachelor of Architecture and Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin.
