Mattias Marschall did a great blog post today where he gave "the elevator pitch" or "5 reasons for using DevOps and Agile". It's really more about Agile methodology than DevOps but it echoes the themes I've seen for DevOps adoption.
Barry Campbell has blogged about .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) doing a report on "the Rise of DevOps" and has posted a general request to talk with folks "doing" DevOps. We already passed along some of our customers but I think Jay is looking for as broad a survey group as possible. Some of the questions Jay is asking include:
'"What was the impetus or circumstances that drove your organization to have developers/engineering work more closely with admins/IT operations?"
"What has driven devops further in your organization, or what has prevented it?"
"What are the top challenges of having dev and ops work together?"
"How would you rate these challenges for devops: cultural, technical, organizational/leadership?"
"How would you rate these drivers of devops: open source, cloud computing, time, economic?"
While these are pretty general questions, asking them may get us all to answers that provide a better insight into DevOps 'issues.' If you can help him out, feel free.
Wikipedia's entry on DevOps is growing and maturing. New entries on the role of the release coordinator -- a role that's rising out of the dust cloud of activity called DevOps that's swirling across IT circles -- hopefully will aide people in getting a grasp on this activity which, until recently, was often "the guy with the spreadsheet." Wikipedia is a common reference point and I know a lot of IT folks use it to read up on things (which is why that area of wikipedia tends to be better and more accurately done). I've reached out to the DevOps LinkedIn group and other DevOps sources to try to get folks to visit the wiki entry and . . . improve on it. It needs to reflect the voice of the community of understanding.
The September Boston DevOps meetup will be at MS NERD (1 Memorial Drive, Cambridge), from 6pm until 8pm, on Tuesday Septemeber 7th, 2010. Engineers from Brightcove will be speaking on how Brightcove uses DevOps to make their operations more efficient.
As I talk to more folks -- customers, prospects and industry analysts -- I am increasingly struck by how much raw noise there is out there about DevOps. We have vendors making claims that would confuse experts and we have bloggers on one end who seem livid that anyone would talk about the topic (other than them) and on the other end spouting Borat-esque grade insight (except without the satire, irony or secret agenda). It's times like these where I have deep sympathy for someone looking for answers, much less help or solutions. Now we have vendors recrufting old-ware as new-ware -- as if changing something to go "new!" means that it hadn't already came and went -- slapping a brand new "Now 50% more DevOps!" sticker on it and flooding the market with relabeled jazzy lit and web pages.
It makes a mess of it for everyone.
Clyde Logue is co-founder of, and Vice President of Product Management for, StreamStep. 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. At Bottomline Technologies, Clyde led product management for enterprise and banking industry customers. Previously, he co-founded
mValent (acquired by Oracle)
Clyde holds an MBA from The Amos Tuck School at Dartmouth College
and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas.
